


lessons in leave-taking

by foghornjazz



Series: nine lives [2]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Feral Jaskier | Dandelion, Hurt/Comfort, Immortal Jaskier | Dandelion, Implied/Referenced Sex, Implied/Referenced Torture, Jaskier | Dandelion Needs a Hug, Jaskier | Dandelion Whump, Kaer Morhen, M/M, Non-Human Jaskier | Dandelion, Psychological Torture, Slow Burn, Stregobor is his own warning..., Temporary Amnesia, Witcher Jaskier | Dandelion, Witcher Politics, all the fun and horrible things really, several times!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 16:29:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29654118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foghornjazz/pseuds/foghornjazz
Summary: They say there’s a Mad Cat roaming the Continent — a Mad Cat who cannot die.After twenty years of silence, odd rumours are beginning to resurface regarding the witcher known as Julian of Kerack. Jaskier can take care of himself, and Geralt doesn’t think much of it. Until Jaskier goes missing — gone without a trace, just as the long, dark winter begins to set in.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Jaskier | Dandelion & Gaetan, Jaskier | Dandelion & Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Series: nine lives [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2176308
Comments: 178
Kudos: 295





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I strongly recommend reading the first part of this series, "lessons in mouse-catching", first, otherwise you will be terribly confused.
> 
> Once again wreaking havoc with timelines and engaging in shameless cherrypicking from game canon. I reworked Gaetan's appearance in the Witcher 3, so if you played that game and recognise anything here, it's because I committed an act of flat out robbery.

The little girl doesn’t realise it’s a trap — so neither does Julian.

She corners him outside the stables, chewing nervously on the end of her sleeve. She can’t be older than eight. She gamely strides up to him, but immediately loses her nerve, and is left staring up at him with her mouth opening and closing like a fish.

“J-Julian of Ker-Kerack,” she begins, halting and slow, before the rest of it all comes out of her in one breathless rush, “thereisamonsterinthewoods, canyoupleasecome?”

“What sort of monster?” he asks, not unkindly.

She shakes her head. “Was just told to fetch you. The Mad Cat. Aren’t — aren't you the Mad Cat?”

Julian hates that nickname. But he can hardly tell the child that, not when she looks one harsh word away from wetting herself. He had been planning to call into the apothecary to sell some cockatrice quills, maybe enough to pay for a room in an inn where he can listen out for word of Nilfgaard’s movements. It’s been a while since he updated Geralt.

But the cockatrice quills aren’t urgent. And this little girl is afraid.

So he lets her lead him into the woods.

“You really can’t tell me anything else about the monster?” he asks.

She purses her lips and shakes her head, unwilling to speak. There is a tremble in her hands, and the sharp tang of barely-suppressed terror oozes from her. He hates how afraid of him she is, inevitable though it might be when he looks like this. Next to all of the black-clad length and breadth of him, his two swords and glittering yellow-green eyes, a child as small as this one is as fragile as a porcelain doll. Since he donned his medallion and left the life of a bard behind, he has gotten re-acquainted with the stench of fear. He can see the very moment children look at him only to draw back or make strange, realising for the first time that they are small, they are vulnerable, that he could hurt them if he wanted to. Realising that the bogeymen their parents warn them about are more than just bedtime stories.

Never happened when he was Jaskier. But that’s not something he much likes to dwell on.

He begins to hum a song as she leads him deeper into the woods, the trees here older, the autumn canopy laced with gold overhead and russet underfoot. It’s a popular children’s rhyme, one handed down for years and years, with just the right amount of cheekiness to give it the illicit thrill that children so delight in. Julian should know; he used to sing it often enough himself.

And, sure as ever, the girl begins to hum along on the chorus. By the bridge, she’s skipping ahead of him in the darkened woodland path, two spots of colour high up on her cheeks, red as the apples that have begun to fall as the year turns in.

“What’s the scariest monster you’ve ever faced?” she asks him when the song is done.

“Hmm.” He pretends to be deep in thought. “An innkeeper’s wife after I stole a piece of pie.”

“No!”

“Oh, yes indeed. The most terrifying thing there is. Can you make a scary face? The scariest face you can?”

She bares her teeth at him, raising her hands with fingers curled into an approximation of claws.

“Very good! Very scary! But, the innkeeper’s wife was even _scarier.”_

“I don’t believe you,” she giggles.

As though affronted, Julian pulls a shocked face, mouth falling open, his hands on his hips. “Now, would I lie to you?”

She just smiles. She no longer smells frightened.

If the girl had been in on the scheme, Julian would have known. Lies are hard to hide from a witcher, never mind a Cat Witcher, who deals in falsehoods as an occupational hazard. But the girl really thinks there’s a monster in the woods.

And in some way, he’ll think bitterly, later, there was.

He doesn’t see the blow coming.

But he hears the little girl’s scream as cuffs are secured over his hands, and a sack tugged over his head. One last kick, and the black swallows him.

He hadn’t even seen it coming.

* * *

Geralt’s heart sinks the moment he finds the silver medallion dropped in the dirt at the village’s edge. Never mind that this one is a little more scratched, more worn, than Jaskier’s — Geralt still does not calm down until he rounds the corner into the clearing, and sees that it’s a stranger who sits on the fallen log, cupping his belly with his hands, with two swords strapped to his back.

“Are you here to kill me?” asks the witcher, very calmly.

Geralt has never encountered him before. Dark hair cropped to a buzz over his skull, a scar that cleaves his cheek from eye to jaw, a jaded sort of smile. A pair of narrow, mistrustful, yellow eyes. They’re of a height, but this witcher is visibly rangier, even where he hunches on the log, spine curved and hand still pressed into the wound in his side. Red splatters his collar, freckles his neck, is smeared and splattered over his tanned arms, like a gauntlet of rubies and gold underneath the dappling sunlight of the clearing.

Some of the blood is his own.

Most of it isn’t.

Geralt has seen many awful things in his long, long life. At this point he is well able to weather such horrors with ease. But the massacre he just passed — the blood of an entire village soaking into the earth, a score of blank-eyed gazes seeming to follow him to the clearing where the culprit still sits — is not a scene easily shaken.

“You lost something,” Geralt says, and holds out the medallion. A snarling cat’s head. He has seen its like before, and he is still not sure whether he’s relieved or not that the witcher in the light-dappled clearing is a stranger after all. 

Hard as it would have been to reconcile the idea of his friend with that of a mass-murderer, Geralt almost wishes it _was_ Jaskier, if only to know for certain that he’s safe. Jaskier is usually good at dropping in with enough news of Nilfgaard to help Geralt and Ciri stay out of their crosshairs as they travel north — but Geralt hasn’t seen hide nor hair of him in over a month.

“You came all this way just to give me back my medallion?” The witcher raises a skeptical eyebrow, still cupping the wound in his side.

“I just want to know what happened.” Geralt is wary. The strange witcher doesn’t look like he plans on making a break for it or attacking Geralt outright, but the fact remains that he’s both injured and cornered; a volatile combination for anyone, never mind a Cat Witcher who, Geralt can’t help but think, is probably already half-crazed. 

Old habits die hard, and old biases harder. 

“What happened?” The witcher barks a bitter laugh. “What always happens, is what.” 

Geralt tilts his head as if to say, _go on._

The witcher rises to his feet. His wound still bleeds, but sluggishly; it’ll close over entirely soon. “You know what they wanted to pay me for the leshen? Go on, guess.”

“A hundred.” That would be low for a leshen, but not so low that it warranted a massacre the likes of which Geralt had just seen.

Narrow-eyed, brittle smile. “Twelve. Twelve fucking crowns.”

“What had they promised you?”

“That, several times over. When I refused to leave until they paid up, they stabbed me in the side with a fucking _pitchfork.”_ He gestures to the wound, expression tight. “What can I say? I saw red.”

A chill wind passes through the clearing, scattering the dappled sunshine that dances on the fading grasses; summer’s last gasp before the approach of winter sets in. Geralt needs to get Ciri north before the trail to Kaer Morhen becomes too treacherous to pass, not wasting time chasing shadows and playing judge, jury and executioner. 

But there still has been no sign of Jaskier. 

It’s irrational. Jaskier can take care of himself. But Geralt still can't shake his sense of mounting dread every time he thinks of Jaskier’s absence. Just because he can’t die doesn’t mean he can’t get hurt, and witcher or not, Jaskier has always had a remarkable capacity for getting himself into trouble.

“I’m used to shit bounties,” says the witcher, darkly. “To being cheated out of what I’m owed, then spat on in the street. But murder me? Just to save some coin? I’m supposed to protect bastards like that? Forget it. I know I went too far, lost my temper, but whatever. My fucking bad. It happens.”

“Not the first time?”

Another humourless grin. “Who are you — the White Wolf? Geralt of Rivia? By the hair, and the medallion, I’d guess that’s it. You wolves do love to get up on your high horses about us cats. I wasn’t even at that wretched tournament. But in the end, we’re _all_ mutants, White Wolf. Even if my mutations were a little more warped than yours. Even if my temper runs a little hotter than yours. Also,” he adds, contemptuous, “I remember what they used to call you. I remember hearing about what happened at Blaviken, _Butcher.”_

Geralt doesn’t react. The last thing he wants is a fight with this Cat, odious as he might be. And besides, something’s been bothering him about this whole thing. “You spared the children.”

Ciri is sitting with them now. A few had been crying and shaking, halfway to hysterics — but most just wore the bewildered look of too-young soldiers after their first real battle. Like they can’t quite comprehend what they’ve just witnessed. Like their entire life has been up-ended, and they’ve got no idea how they’re meant to go on in an upside-down world. Ciri had looked a little like that when he had found her in the woods. Sometimes, when her smile fades, she still does.

“Yeah, well, the kids did nothing.” The Cat is rocking on the balls of his feet where he stands, bloodstained hands crossed over his chest. He smells unhappy, underneath all of the blood — uncomfortable, bitter, guilty. “I— it doesn't matter.”

“Wouldn't have mentioned it if it didn't matter.” Geralt isn’t sure what to make of this restless Cat, by turns biting and vulnerable. He doesn’t appear especially belligerent, but he never lets Geralt out of his sight. He is nothing like Jaskier — but Geralt can tell they’ve been cut from a very similar cloth. Watchful. Talkative. A little bit wild.

“They reminded me of someone,” says the witcher, distantly. “The kids. They reminded me of my sister. And — and this one little boy I saved from drowners, years and years ago.”

“Where are they now?” Geralt asks. He’s not sure why — witchers don't have human families. For good reason. Humans die. “Your sister, and the boy?”

“Sister’s been dead for years.” He glances up at Geralt. “Old age. You know how it goes. And as for the boy — well, his parents were worse than the drowners, so I took him with me to the School of the Cat. He was a good lad. Made a good witcher.”

“Was?”

Another sidelong glance, though the witcher continues without missing a beat. “Haven’t heard from him since the sacking. He’s dead, just like the rest of them.”

A lie. Geralt hears it in the trip of his heart, sees it in the twitch of his finger.

What cause would he have to lie? Unless—

“You know he’s not dead.” Geralt can’t help the growl that enters his voice. He takes a step forward. “Julian of Kerack. Where is he?”

Immediately, the strange witcher’s wariness returns, multiplied threefold. His eyes shutter over, all traces of vulnerability vanished, and he flashes Geralt a sharp-toothed grin. His hands hover by the dagger in his belt. “Why do you care? I can count on one hand the amount of Cats that are left.”

“But I’m only looking for one,” Geralt says. “Where is he? Have you seen him?”

“I haven't seen him in twenty years,” the witcher all but spits. “I thought he was killed in the sacking — up until recently. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumours.”

“Enlighten me,” Geralt growls.

“The Mad Cat that can’t die,” says the witcher. “All bullshit, obviously. Everyone dies. Even witchers.”

Another lie. He hides it better this time, his heartbeat steady, his fingers still. But he wouldn't be so defensive if he didn’t know it was true.

And he wouldn't be so defensive if he didn’t care, on some level, that no one find out.

“Nobody catches Julian,” the witcher continues. “I don’t know what he’s done to you, but you should keep that in mind. He’s survived far worse than the Butcher of bloody Blaviken.” There is a stiff line to the witcher’s back, his eyes flashing as he speaks. He looks about an inch away from hissing at Geralt; arms loose at his side, weight shifting from foot to foot like he’s readying himself for a fight. 

_This one little boy I saved from drowners, years and years ago … He was a good lad and he made an even better witcher._

Mass-murderer or not — Geralt realises that he and this strange, bitter, bloodthirsty witcher have something in common.

“I’m a friend of Julian’s,” Geralt tells him, chin high, refusing to shrink back under the other witcher’s fury. “And I’m worried about him. I thought you might have heard something.”

The witcher pauses to digest that. His gaze never leaves Geralt’s, searching for any trace of a lie, mistruth, or misrepresentation. 

“He’s my friend,” Geralt repeats, firmly.

“Why are you worried about him?” he settles on, at last, his voice bearing none of the animosity it had earlier — but just as much suspicion. “Has something happened?”

“Got a bad feeling.”

The witcher shakes his head. “Well, I haven't seen him, not since before the caravan was sacked. But I heard stories. Rumours.” He crosses his arms again, hands moving away from the weapons on his belt. “You know?”

“Know about Julian?”

Careful, the Cat nods.

Geralt sniffs. “There’s been a demonstration or two.”

The witcher’s mouth twitches. “I’ll bet. Little fool doesn't know what’s good for him, half the time. Or at least, he didn’t when last I saw him.” He sobers, then, something deeply sad settling in him, taking root. “Listen — you’re his friend, so you know this already. But it’s not a good thing, not wholly, this curse of his. I hadn’t been telling the whole truth earlier, when I said I saved him from drowners.”

He draws a breath, and when his gaze meets Geralt’s, it’s ugly with fury. “He’d been a whole fucking week in the lake before I got there.”

A whole _week—_ Jaskier had never told him that. He swallows a wave of horror. A whole week at the mercy of monsters, unable to die. A whole week in the dark depths of a lake, with no end in sight.

“Drowning over and over again,” the witcher continues. “Just a kid — six, maybe seven. A child. And I was glad when I heard the rumours that he was back, of course I fucking was, since I had though he was finally gone for good — but it’s not a good thing that people are talking. You know how many people would want a gift like he's got?”

“I can imagine.”

“You know what it’s like to be a mutant already. Now, imagine being a mutant who can’t die. There are plenty of people who’d want to take him apart to see how he works, especially when they won’t have to worry about putting him back together again.”

It’s a lie that witchers don't feel fear: Geralt’s blood runs cold.

There is silence in the clearing again, silence but for the gentle susurrus of the grasses in the breeze.

“He really missing?” the witcher asks.

Geralt shrugs. “He’s probably fine. What’s your name? When I find Julian, I’ll tell him you were asking after him.”

The witcher smirks a little. “Gaetan. I helped that kitten catch his first mouse — he had better not have forgotten me.”

Geralt nods. “I’ll take the children to the next village. You should get out of here.”

Gaetan’s expression shuts down again. “Yeah,” he says, quiet. “Yeah, I had better.” He turns to leave, but pauses, gaze cast back over his shoulder. “Julian is... good. Too good for the life I doomed him to. I don't think it ever suited him. I did what I thought was right at the time, but I think…”

Geralt waits.

“If I could go back, I would do a lot of things differently,” Gaetan finishes, distantly.

Without another word, he turns and goes, the blood of the village still staining his hands. Silently, Geralt watches him go.

* * *

Julian wakes to the ice-cold splash of a bucketful of water.

He spits a mouthful of blood — they kicked him in the face — and bears red-stained teeth at his captors. “Now, I don’t know what sort of ale you drink in Velen, but is that really any way to treat a potential employee? Where’s my monster, huh?”

In an instant, he’s taken stock of his injuries — a couple of cracked ribs and a gash in his side, both already knitting themselves back together, is the worst of it — and his location. He’s shackled to a chair in what looks like a barn, stared down at by half a dozen furious-looking farmers. The cuffs are dimeritium; Julian has never favoured Signs, but he recognises the block on his rudimentary magic. A blank nothingness, all access to it cut off at the source.

The cuffs are dimeritium. What would a group of farmers be doing with dimeritium?

He doesn’t have time to wonder.

“We saw what you did in Honorton, witcher.” The speaker is a rather-official looking man, portly and dressed in finer clothes than the rest of them. Presumably some kind of leader.

“I don’t even know where that is,” Julian says, honestly. “Honorton? Is it nice? Should I holiday there? Would you recommend it? What would you rate it out of ten?”

“Shut the fuck up, murderer!” a farmer backhands him.

Oh, dear. This is about murder. He had better cut down on the jokes.

“A whole village, massacred,” one of the farmers hisses. “And a yellow-eyed cat witcher done it, we heard.”

Julian gapes. “Listen. I’m sorry about what happened. Really. But I don’t know anything about a massacre — I arrived in Velen this morning.”

“Nice try,” says the leader. “But we know who you are. The Mad Cat of Kerack, the witcher with nine lives who doesn’t think twice before he takes two dozen. You shouldn’t have left the children be if you hadn’t wanted to be discovered.”

Julian sighs. “I don’t know anything. If another witcher massacred a village, then I do apologise on the behalf of all of us. Truly. But that witcher was not me.”

“You seem to be under the mistaken impression that this is some kind of court,” says the leader. “That you’re here to be judged, Mad Cat. But we already know what you did. We already know you’re guilty.”

Julian does his very best not to roll his eyes — they’ve _shackled him to a chair_ in the _middle of the room._ This is a twisted courthouse if ever he saw one. And as for already having decided that he’s guilty before he’s had a chance to speak — well, what the hell do they think courts are usually for?

“Is that so? Then what am I here for?” he asks.

“You’re here to die.” It’s a different voice that speaks — a voice that sounds from right behind him — a voice a million miles away from the rough-hewn tone of his farmer-run court.

There’s a red-hot blaze at his throat, and blood pouring down his front. He hadn't seen the knife coming.

It seems to be a running theme for him at the moment.

* * *

Julian is dead. And then, abruptly, he isn't.

He is no longer in the barn. Instead, he has been tossed into a small cell, hands and feet still bound, and shackled to the wall. A pile of straw for a bed and a chamber-pot are his only creature comforts; the glimpse of sky he can see outside the single window is stained red. His armour has been stripped, leaving him in just his trousers and his loose undershirt, stained rust-brown with dried blood.

A bearded man is standing just outside the bars, looking at him with eyes alight with curiosity.

Julian spits blood onto the floor. “Couldn't you have bought me a drink first?”

He refuses to panic as a point of personal pride and general decorum. Unfortunately, he has spent a long time as a bard with no discernible sense of pride or decorum beyond that which he put into his singing. So, he’s panicking. He gives the chains a cursory sort of tug — they hold, of course, what the hell else was he expecting — before turning back to the man and swallowing back the fear that crawls many-legged up his throat.

“It’s true,” says the man. “You were dead, and now you’re not.”

He’s dressed _very_ richly, Julian notices. His hands are clasped in front of him. And he _stinks_ of magic; the gathering thunder of chaos, mixed with something horrid and sickly, a blend of rot-water and roses.

“Who are you?” Julian rasps. “What the fuck do you want with me?”

“My name,” says the mage, calmly, “is Stregobor. And I think we can learn a lot from each other, Julian Alfred Pancratz.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cannot stick to a schedule to save my LIFE but I will do my best to keep updates quick and consistent!
> 
> I have a tumblr again! It's bardcoreblues, pls come and be my friend.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning in this chapter for scenes of torture, violence and (impermanent) character death. Jaskier/Julian does not talk in a very respectful way about sex workers or Stregobor's physical attributes. There is also discussion of death & suicidal thoughts that will continue through the rest of the fic — if these are issues that affect you, please tread with caution and stay safe <3

Stregobor speaks softly and evenly, as if this is a perfectly ordinary conversation, held under perfectly ordinary circumstances. “Is there a limit to what you can do?”

_There once lived a rotten old wizard/_

_But no one was scared of his wrath/_

_For he had a face like a lizard/_

_And was in dire need of a bath._

_Eh, not great,_ Julian thinks. He knows he can do much better, though he hasn't decided whether or not his captor deserves the effort.

“Julian,” says Stregobor, stern as a schoolmaster who has just caught a pupil carving their initials on the desk. “You know, you aren’t making this any easier on yourself.”

Julian says nothing, instead smiling vaguely up at the vaulted ceiling of the dungeon and entirely ignoring his captor in favour of working out the kinks in the rhythm of the lyrics. He might sing it for Stregobor next time he asks a question that Julian has no interest in answering. He doesn’t bother to compose an original melody; he’ll set it to the tune of the _Fishmonger’s Daughter_ or something equally offensive to a man of such fine tastes as Stregobor purports to have.

Julian has never been afraid of death. Easy for him to say, to be fair, since he’s done it enough times to be accustomed to how it works; the growing heaviness in his limbs, the dimming of the world around him, the sensation of suddenly sinking — unstoppable but not uncomfortable, when all is said and done. Almost easier than falling asleep. And it’s easy enough for him to say that he isn’t afraid of dying when, for him, dying has never managed to stick. But living for long enough has demonstrated that there are worse things than death; that after a life well-lived, death’s mystique, its terror, is shrunk. Everything has to have an end. Once the fear is stripped away, that’s all death is. An end.

So, he is not afraid that Stregobor will kill him. He’s afraid because he knows that it won’t last. He’ll come back, again and again and again. Death isn’t the end; he won't be so lucky.

Stregobor paces around the gurney to which Julian has been firmly shackled. He's been stripped to his smallclothes, his bare flesh goose-pimpling in the chill, and it is all he can do to banish the memory of the last time he was laid out on one of these: writhing, blinded with agony, as the Trial of the Grasses mutated him slowly from the inside out. He strongly suspects Stregobor can read his mind, and as such he would rather not let his captor glimpse the particularly potent poison of _that_ memory. There is an apprentice or two scurrying around the edges of Julian’s vision, but he doesn’t recognise them and has not been told their names. They are holding tools that Julian does not care to examine; instead, he focuses on a very fascinating crack in the ceiling tiles overhead.

“Last time,” Stregobor continues, “it took you three hours to revive. Would you wager that that is an average measure? Or does the severity of the wound responsible dictate the length of time it takes to resuscitate?”

Julian frowns, deep in thought. He could try to incorporate something or other about a disappointed whore and a very small cock?

“Julian.” Stregobor leans over him so that his upside-down visage fills Julian’s vision.

Abruptly, Julian decides that he hates that name — hates the name when it comes from Stregobor’s mouth, when it is spoken with such quiet malice, with such clinical precision. 

Suddenly, with all the force of a physical blow, Julian misses being called _Jaskier._ He misses being harmless; misses when the very worst threat his name was uttered with was the threat of forced castration — which had been rather alarming at the time, of course, but he _had_ slept with the man’s daughter, and besides the fact he was already functionally sterile, he had enough skills left that the old man would never have gotten anywhere near his balls anyway, even if Geralt hadn't shown up in the nick of time to rescue him. Twenty two years reprieve from real fear feels far too short a time. None of the little terrors he had suffered as a bard could hold a candle to the threat with which Stregobor infuses his every word now, gazing down at him where he is pinned to the table as though he is nothing more than an especially interesting science project.

Julian does his very best to school his face into an expression of indifference. A petty, pointless sort of rebellion, as he already knows the cold prodding of Stregobor’s mind against his own. The mage already knows he is afraid.

_There once lived a rotten old wizard/_

_With him no whore could bear to linger/_

_But fled instead from his grunting pot-belly/_

_And prick the size of a pinky finger._

Julian glimpses a shadow of irritation pass over Stregobor’s features as he hears the song echoing through his mind. He grins. “Do you like my rhymes? I’ve been working on them all day. They’re not very good, I’ll admit, but I save the effort for people who actually deserve it.”

“I see that talking to you will bear no fruit,” Stregobor says, airily. “So I suppose we’ll be doing this the hard way after all.” He turns to one of his apprentices. “Bleed him out, and record the moment his heart stops. We’ll measure the time it takes for him to come back.”

Julian tries to thrash, tries to tear himself free from the gurney — but this one has been adjusted for his mutated strength. He knows the effort is in vain — he _knows,_ but just lying there and taking it feels far too much like surrender.

Stregobor waves a hand, and suddenly, Julian can’t move. An invisible weight presses down on all of limbs, holding him fast to the cold metal surface of the gurney. 

“Do hold still, Julian,” he says, in a soft voice. “All that exertion might interfere with the accuracy of the numbers.”

Julian’s chest heaves, but every other part of his body has been cemented still by the force of Stregobor’s spell. 

But he can still speak. “Fuck you,” he hisses.

Stregobor waves a hand again, and Julian’s tongue is glued to the roof of his mouth.

The pain in both of his wrists as the apprentices cut them open is easily ignored. His panic isn’t. Every nerve ending is lit up with it; he is electric with adrenaline atop the gurney, even as he can’t move so much as a finger. Up to this point, a part of him had refused to acknowledge what had been happening. But now, paralysed on the tabletop, blood trickling steadily from each wrist, reality has become impossible to ignore.

He can't quite remember the first time the vague dread of his ability had solidified into this — into an actual, genuine terror of being caught and experimented upon. He thinks maybe it was old Guxart, who had heard about the sacking of Kaer Morhen, and had pulled Julian aside outside the caravan one day.

“There are always people who threaten witchers,” he had said, his grip on Julian’s arm firm. “People like the ones who destroyed Stygga, Kaer Morhen, and others. People who hate witchers, who fear witchers, and who want to stop the making of more. But worse, are the people who are _interested_ in us. The people who want to know how mutants like us are made; who want to discover what makes us tick.”

Julian had just smiled indulgently at the old witcher. “Don’t know what you mean. Aren't we all mutants here?”

“Mm,” Guxart had smiled back, thinly. “Some more so than others, Julian. Do be careful.”

Then he had carried on, hurrying around the corner of the caravan to grab one of the younger trainees by the scruff of her neck before she bit Aiden on the wrist for telling her off. Julian had watched him go, feeling a new sort of dread settle thickly in the pit of his stomach. It came as no surprise sharp-eyed old Guxart knew about him — whether Gaetan had told him, or he had figured it out himself was irrelevant. Besides, Guxart would never tell anyone. What worried him was that Guxart had taken the time to _warn_ him — in an oblique, gruff sort of way, sure, but it was a warning all the same. _We’re all mutants, but some of us more so than others._

Thanks to his delightful witcher healing, the apprentices have to keep re-opening the wounds to ensure he continues to bleed. It is painful, but in a very distant way. Julian thinks maybe he’s losing consciousness already; there is the vaguest hint of a headache starting up at his temples, and he’s tired. His fear is beginning to feel far away. Like this is happening to somebody else entirely, and Julian is just an unwilling spectator.

Out of nowhere, he thinks about Geralt.

Is Geralt coming for him? He would like to think so, but he can’t be sure. Geralt has a child to look after now, a child with a bounty on her head — he is probably much too busy keeping Ciri alive to come running after Julian. He’s probably much too busy to save Julian from his own messes like he had when Julian was still Jaskier, was still an idiot bard prone to _"putting his sausage in the wrong royal_ _pantry"_ and other such mild misdemeanours. And this _is_ Julian’s mess, make no mistake, even if, in this instance, no sausages or pantries are involved. He’d known about the danger for decades; had known since Guxart laid a hand on his arm and warned him to tread carefully. Had known since he resurfaced alive and well after twenty years, truly a Cat with nine lives. Geralt isn’t his keeper — less so now than ever before — and he can’t be expected to save Julian every time he lands himself in trouble, even if this sort of trouble might very well be the worst he's ever faced.

But Julian still hopes. It’s a treacherous thing, hope, he thinks, as he sinks down into the dark. The hope might keep him fighting, might keep him alive — but if Geralt doesn’t come — _when_ Geralt doesn't come — he’ll be all the sorrier for ever having longed for him at all. 

* * *

“Two and a half hours this time, Julian,” Stregobor tells him.

“Marvellous,” Julian rasps. “Do I get a prize?”

He feels terrible. He always does, afterwards. Both groggy and raw at once; a little out of step with himself, like he’s tipped over to the unpleasant, maudlin, dizzy side of drunkenness.

“Would you like to tell me anything about your ability, or shall we continue with the experiment?” Stregobor is wearing a leather apron, which, considering this is no sort of kitchen, Julian does not take to be a promising sign.

“I do love how you act like we won’t continue with the experiment anyway,” he says. “Tell me: is it true you have to conjure up naked women because no real one can bear the sight of you?”

Stregobor does not rise to the bait. Gently, almost tenderly, he strokes a lock of hair out of Julian’s eyes. “You’ll break, witcher,” he says. “Everybody does.”

A laugh bubbles up out of Julian before he can stop it. “Awfully presumptuous of you, Stregobor, since we’ve already established you’ve met no one quite like me before.”

“Hand me the scalpel,” Stregobor says to one of his assistants, then, “and we’ll see what, exactly, this mutant is made of.”

Julian harbours no illusions about maintaining some machismo sense of pride or dignity; he doesn’t even try to stop himself from screaming.

* * *

Jaskier announces himself with a loudness that is mostly for Geralt’s benefit, since Geralt is well aware he can move silent as a ghost should he choose to. He crunches his way through dead leaves and cracks every fallen twig on his way to their campsite, before strolling up to ruffle Ciri’s recently-chopped hair.

“Oho! Is that rabbit? Can I have some?” He points to the stew currently bubbling over the fire. “I’m starving. Been dodging a Nilfgaardian patrol for a week, then got terribly shortchanged for a contract this morning. Really, it was scandalous what they paid me. I ought to have strung that mayor up with his own livery for the offence.”

“Hello, Jaskier,” Geralt says, unamused, still rubbing Roach down after a long day’s ride.

It would be inaccurate to say that Geralt had fallen out of the habit of calling Jaskier by his real name, when in truth, he never fell into the habit of calling him _Julian_ in the first place. If it looks (mostly) like Jaskier, and it talks (mostly) like Jaskier, he’s perfectly content to continue calling it Jaskier.

Jaskier, for his part, has not asked him to stop.

“You smell _foul,”_ Ciri objects, shuffling backwards and out of Jaskier’s reach.

“I know.” Jaskier appears to be just as dismayed by his strong odour as Ciri is. “Whole horde of rotfiends outside Vizima. I’ll wash up before dinner, I promise.”

Well, Geralt reminds himself. Looks and acts _mostly_ like Jaskier — and when he emerges from the nearby stream, shivering and complaining indefatigably of the cold with only the barest sliver of chamomile-scented soap left in his hand — smells like Jaskier, too.

Ciri, exhausted after the day’s travel, drops off on Jaskier’s shoulder barely a minute after she’s scraped her bowl clean. Geralt pretends he isn’t looking as Jaskier smiles fondly down at her, shifting his stance so as not to wake her, eating his own stew one-handed, the bowl braced against the crease of his bent knee.

“Nilfgaard?” Geralt asks, too quiet for Ciri to hear, but loud enough for Jaskier’s heightened hearing to pick up with ease.

“Progressing north,” he replies, just as quietly. “But slower. They'll certainly have to pause the campaign for the winter; most of their soldiers have never been this far north in their lives, and they’ll struggle with the cold. As long as you make it to Kaer Morhen before the pass freezes over, you’ll both be safe.”

“And you?”

The dancing light of the fire catches eerily on Jaskier’s eyes, reflecting against them; he looks momentarily like a half-tame animal sitting across from Geralt. “I’ll keep flanking you, and dropping in with updates. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure to see you and the princess off before you go.”

“Jaskier.” Geralt is well aware that Jaskier already knows what he’s going to say.

“Melitele's tits, Geralt, I don't know what you want from me!” Jaskier says, suddenly — though he is still very careful not to wake Ciri. “You know I won't be welcome in Kaer Morhen, yet you continue to ask me to come. You act like everything is fine and dandy between us, and then turn around and ask me why I even needed you to escort me to Pavetta’s betrothal ball in the first place if I was secretly a witcher all along.”

“I still haven't gotten an answer for that one,” Geralt interrupts, bristling.

“Because I _wanted_ you _there,”_ Jaskier hisses. “Of course I could take care of myself — but I didn’t _want to!”_

Geralt doesn’t quite know what to say to that. Instead, he opts for, “Lambert has been threatening to bring his friend Aiden to Kaer Morhen for years. Vesemir will be angry, but he’ll hardly throw you out.”

“I’m not afraid of _Vesemir._ It’s not — Vesemir isn’t the fucking issue here. And as for Aiden — well, he’ll stay well away from wolves if he has any sense,” Jaskier mutters.

“Sometimes,” Geralt growls out, “I don’t think you even _want_ to fix this.”

Jaskier is livid at that. “Fix _what,_ Geralt? Because I have to say, even with my sharp eyes, whatever _this_ is—” and at that, he gestures to the space between them with his free hand, “—remains remarkably unclear!”

“If you two don't stop fighting,” Ciri mumbles, head still pillowed on Jaskier’s shoulder, “I will dump the remains of the stew over Geralt’s head.”

Jaskier’s flashing eyes and bared teeth are gone in an instant. “I can attest to the fact that it takes two to tango, Cirilla — why aren't you threatening to dump it over _my_ head, too?”

“I’m not a savage. Youjust washed your hair.”

Geralt snorts a laugh at that. The dark cloud that had descended over their little campsite is broken, abruptly; he can hear the merry crackles of the fire, and the rustling of the breeze through the branches overhead. Jaskier looks human again — or as human as a witcher can look.

“C’mon then, kitten,” Jaskier says, jostling Ciri off his shoulder, before swinging her up and over his back as easy as if he were lifting a kitten after all. “Time for bed.”

“My threat still stands,” Ciri says, between yawns. “No more fighting.”

“No more fighting,” Geralt agrees, rising to his feet to tuck her into her bedroll.

* * *

Julian comes alive with a horrid wheezing start, blood in the throat, his heart sore with the effort of beating.

“Welcome back,” says Stregobor, without looking up from his notes. “That was an entire eleven hours, Julian. No sign of rigor mortis, of course. Your body remained limp. Had there been even a hint of stiffening I would have thought you dead for good.”

Julian just groans. Even if he had something insulting to say, he would be too drained to say it. His thoughts come slow and shapeless; mostly he thinks that he’s cold and he’s thirsty.

Stregobor does not let Julian rest for long in between deaths. The days, quite literally, are bleeding into one another. He couldn't say how long he’s been here, in this brightly lit, clinically clean dungeon; could not even count the amount of times he has died. He’s been beheaded, exsanguinated, gutted, dismembered, vivisected — and that _was_ unpleasant — suffocated, hanged, beaten, frozen, strangled, and even, on one memorable occasion, burned alive. Every time, he comes hurtling back into himself, with only the silvery mark of a long-healed scar and the phantom pains of torture to mark the death that did not stick. The cycle is endless, sucking him dry every time, so much so that his mind is beginning to feel hollow. His life has been distilled down to a ragged, endless cycle of agonising, blinding pain, so enduringly horrific it burns everything else out, and then death. But his blissful reprieves of nothingness, his sweet forays into oblivion, never, ever fucking _last._ Too soon, he jolts back to life again.

Then, unerringly, without even giving him enough time to sleep, the cycle begins again. 

The process has sucked all the strength from him; he can no longer even muster the energy to be afraid.

“Interesting. It did take a large part of a day, but no matter how far your limbs are taken, whether elsewhere in the building or on the other side of the continent, they’ll reappear at the same time, spontaneously re-attached.”

Julian hums, drawing from a well of defiance he did not know he still had. “Mmm. Always been stubborn like that. Persistent. Like fleas. Can’t get rid of me.”

Stregobor does not even grace his efforts with a chuckle. “What of something a little slower? Hunger, perhaps? Well, I suppose thirst will take you first. Shall we just leave you here, then, without food or water — leave you here to rot?”

“You’re already starving me,” Julian objects. They are, too. He managed to woo a few gulps of water from a more sympathetic apprentice, but that was at least two deaths ago, and he hasn’t seen food once in the indeterminate time he’s been down here. He can’t lift his head enough to see the evidence, but he knows for sure that he’s already lost a lot of weight. “Much as I would love to subsist on the power of music and poetry alone, I’m immortal, you old coot, not incorporeal. I _can_ and I _will_ waste away.”

“What a pity that would be,” says Stregobor. “Have you decided to tell us, then, how it is that you came to be immortal? Because, Julian, enlightening as my experiments have been on the capabilities and mutations of a witcher of the Cat School, there is absolutely nothing about your body, inward or outward, that would indicate the presence of your most _special_ ability.”

“I was born under the Curse of the Black Sun,” Julian says baldly.

Stregobor has gone very quiet and very still. He lowers his journal of notes and peers at Julian with his most searching gaze. “Really?”

“No,” says Julian. “I was actually born on a Monday.”

Stregobor closes his eyes in a brief expression of profound irritation. 

“It’s why I’m so handsome,” Julian continues, merrily. _“Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, Wednesday’s child—”_

Stregobor has muted him again. He can’t move his tongue from the roof of his mouth.

“So. Leaving you to die of thirst it is,” he says, softly, furiously.

Julian winks at him as he stalks his way out of the room.

* * *

It’s been two and a half weeks since they met Gaetan, with no word from Jaskier once during that time. Geralt and Ciri only narrowly avoid a Nilfgaardian patrol as they head north-east, which solidifies Geralt’s fear that something must have happened — had Jaskier still been clearing the way for them, he never would have let Nilfgaard get so close. Instead of continuing towards Kaer Morhen, they double back and loop around in the hope of hearing some hint as to his whereabouts.

They’re cutting it close, though. It’s getting cold.

Then Geralt and Ciri come upon a horse that looks an awful lot like Pegasus being led out of some no-name village in northern Temeria.

Geralt moves like lightning. He has the strange man pinned by the neck to the village wall in moments, as the horse — Pegasus, unmistakably Pegasus — shies away from them.

Ciri grabs onto Pegasus’ reins with one hand, holding Roach’s with the other.

“Where the _fuck_ is he?” Geralt growls.

A child somewhere screams; Ciri can hear the sounds of hurried footsteps.

The man quakes in Geralt’s grip, eyes wide with fright. “W-who?”

“The person who owns this horse,” Geralt grits out, jaw stiff with fury. “Where is he?”

A crowd of villagers have appeared at the gate — all armed. They approach slowly, but surely, each wearing an identical expression of fury.

“Get on out of here, witcher!” one man cries. “We thought we made it clear — we don’t want no witchers here!”

“The witcher who owns this horse,” Geralt spits, wild with rage, holding the man who had been taking Pegasus against the wall with one hand, while gesturing to the spooked grey gelding with the other. “Where is he?”

Ciri isn’t sure if she’s ever seen him so angry; her stomach twists in her belly as she hushes Pegasus, who is a little flightier than Roach is, and keeps trying to back away from the brawl that’s beginning to brew.

“Dead. We killed ‘im,” a villager says, odiously. “And we’ll kill you, too, if you don’t make yourself scarce.”

Geralt’s nostrils flare. “The body. Where is his body?”

The angry crowd mutters a little, expressions mutinous. They tighten their grips on their various axes and scythes, as though unwilling to speak. Geralt could tear through them in the time it takes to blink, Ciri knows. He looks angry enough to do it, too.

Then, in a movement too quick to catch, Geralt has a knife pressed to the man’s neck.

“Tell me what you did with his body,” he says, “or I will cut out this man’s throat.”

“Mage took him,” says a small voice.

A little girl has squirmed free of her mother’s grip. She gazes up at Geralt, beseechingly, big eyes rapidly filling with tears. “Please,” she whimpers. “I never knew. But the mage, the wizard, he took the Mad Cat’s body away.”

“What is the mage’s name?” Geralt says. He doesn’t loosen his grip on the unfortunate man’s throat, but his voice is no longer thick with fury. Instead, Ciri thinks, it sounds halfway to a plea. “Tell me the mage’s name, and then we’ll go. You’ll never have to deal with another witcher again. Just give me his name.”

“Stregobor,” says one of the villagers. “The mage’s name was Stregobor.”

Geralt throws the man to the ground, unharmed. Helping Ciri up onto Pegasus, who is still saddled with all of Jaskier’s tack, he mounts Roach with a face like thunder.

“We need Yen,” is all he says, but Ciri knows the look in his amber eyes. She’s seen it before, in the tower cell that Jaskier had rescued them from. He's despairing, and she doesn't know who Stregobor is, or what any of this means for Jaskier — but it cannot possibly bode well.

She does her best not to think about it as she urges Pegasus into a gallop alongside a stone-faced Geralt.

* * *

“G’rlt?”

Geralt is standing in the room. The shape of him is a little fuzzy, but everything is a little fuzzy at the moment. Otherwise, he looks his usual gruff self, armoured for battle, his silver hair clean and tied back so it doesn’t fall into his eyes.

Julian hasn’t been thirsty in days. Or, at least, he thinks it’s been days. His head has stopped hurting too. Maybe he’s slept, but it’s felt more like a doze. He can probably wiggle his toes, but it seems a pointless endeavour to try.

His mouth is dry. The words come breathy and slurred. “Geralt,” he tries again.

Geralt smiles at him. Very out of character, Julian thinks. He can’t imagine what sort of bizarre thing he must have done to draw a _smile_ out of Geralt of Rivia.

A scuffling from the corner of the room. One of the apprentices tasked with watching him die, probably. Julian doesn’t care. Geralt will take care of them.

“Jaskier,” Geralt says, in his lovely rich grumble of a voice. He sounds almost _fond._ Julian — Jaskier — must be dreaming. “How did you manage to end up here?”

“Lack of discretion,” Julian says — or at least, he tries to say. He’s not sure how comprehensible he is. “Some very bad luck. My charming personality. The usual.”

Geralt seems to understand him anyway.

The apprentice is calling for someone.

“Fuck _off!”_ Jaskier yells at him, rising halfway off the gurney. “Not you, Geralt.”

“Hm,” Geralt says, eyes still crinkled with amusement. “You’re not looking so great, Jas.”

“I’ve been down here a while, Geralt. I’m afraid I'm really not at the top of my game.”

He’s definitely not coherent. He’s saying one thing in his head, only for a bastardised version to come pouring out of his mouth. “G’rlt?” he tries again.

Geralt seems to understand him perfectly, somehow. “Not long now,” he says, standing over Jaskier, hand half raised as though he were about to reach out and touch him. “Not long.”

“Wha’?”

Distantly, he hears the sounds of someone approaching. Gods, but he hopes it isn’t Stregobor. He feels as though he’s already been down here a hundred years, and has had more than enough of Stregobor in that time to last him a hundred more. He really never gave Yennefer enough credit for being both a mage _and_ a reasonably kind and generally sane individual, despite all their differences over the years. Next time he sees her, he resolves to lay a big fat smooch upon her cheek.

“G’rlt?” Julian mumbles again. “Please. Please don’ go.”

Geralt just smiles down at him, sadly.

“No need to panic,” says Stregobor’s voice. “Dehydration can often induce delirium. He’s simply hallucinating.”

“Fuck offfffffffff,” Jaskier groans. “Where—where is _Geralt?”_

“Perfectly normal,” the horrible nasty mage continues, as if Julian hadn’t spoken. “It will pass — I expect he’ll lose consciousness entirely soon.”

He comes to stand over Julian, frowning down at him thoughtfully. “Geralt of Rivia, I presume. I wonder…”

He waves his hand. Geralt reappears. He isn’t fuzzy this time — Julian could count every hair on his head, he’s in such high definition.

“Julian,” Geralt sighs. But that’s not—

Geralt never calls him _Julian._ He had thought it was some kind of punishment, at first, Geralt’s refusal to call him anything but the name he had taken on when he first donned the bard disguise. Like he was reminding him of the lie. But then, slowly, he had begun to realise that perhaps _Jaskier_ was just the name Geralt was used to. The one that he preferred.

Then, abruptly, the mirage of Geralt blinks out.

“I think we’ve been going about this the entirely wrong way, Julian,” Stregobor says. “You’ve shown yourself to be remarkably resistant to physical pain, and it’s clear at this stage that there isn’t any information to be gleaned from dissection. Whatever your ability is, it is not one inherent to your body. Rather, it is some kind of magic, one that I am unfamiliar with.” He leans forward, tracing the hard line of Julian’s jaw with his fingertip, and coming to rest on his temple. His hands are soft, his touch feather-light. If Julian’s mouth wasn’t dry as bone, he would spit at him. “All the same, I expect you’ve been holding out on us. There is a mystery at the heart of you, Julian Alfred Pancratz, and the answer, if there is any to be found, will be right here.” 

Tap, tap, tap, goes his finger on Julian’s forehead. He smiles down at him. Julian can’t even bring himself to glare back.

“Fetch me when he dies. I’ll need time to make ready the next stage of our investigation.” With a swoosh of his robes, Stregobor turns and leaves.

Letting his eyes drift closed, Julian allows himself to sink back into unconsciousness. He doesn’t like the sound of the _next stage,_ nor does he like the fact that Stregobor now knows of his association with Geralt, if he hadn’t already — but worrying about it seems so far beyond his capabilities at the moment that he doesn’t even try.

He just… drifts. He’ll be dead soon, and, with any luck, he’ll stay that way. He doesn't hold out hope, though. He hasn’t been especially lucky so far. 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jaskier can have little a body shaming Stregobor through my horrifically composed rhyme. As a treat.
> 
> Thank you as always for reading — the response to this series has been INSANE. I know I keep saying it but I simply cannot get over it!
> 
> Stay safe wherever you are <3


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is full of triggery stuff in the context of an extended nightmare-sequence. There is also a discussion of vomiting. If you need, you can skip to the end notes for more details -- stay safe!

When Julian next draws breath, it sends a jagged spoke of pain through his chest. His lips are cracked and chapped, and his brain feels weirdly heavy in his skull, weighing his head forward where it flops down, chin to chest. They've dressed him in loose trousers and a roughspun tunic, and moved him from the gurney onto some kind of uncomfortable metal chair, his waist secured to the seat with a belt, but his hands left loose and folded in his lap. His wrists are still cuffed in dimeritium, the thin strip of skin he can see underneath chafed raw, but he’s free to move them. Sitting up the minute he summons the strength, he ignores the throbbing in his head, the numb coldness of his limbs, the ache in his bones, in favour of looking around.

Same old dungeon. He’s getting really sick of counting ceiling tiles.

“Welcome back, Julian,” says Stregobor. He sits on his own much more comfortable chair opposite Julian, elaborate peacock quill in hand and journal braced on his knee. “That was a very interesting case study. You were dead for over twenty hours.”

Julian does not answer. He wiggles his fingers and his toes, and finds it exhausts him. His heart beats only sluggishly in his chest. He’s running on empty, and if he doesn't get food and water soon, he’ll die again within the day. 

“I hypothesise that the more complex the processes involved and the more damaging the cause of death is to the body, the more time it generally takes you to recover,” Stregobor continues, tone genial, as if he thinks Julian ought to care. “Withholding food and water did damage to your entire system, which is why I expect it took you so long to recover.”

“Fascinating,” Julian croaks. He closes his eyes and indulges briefly in his favourite fantasies. Namely, fantasies of strangling Stregobor where he sits, and then stabbing him in the eye with his peacock quill, and then strapping him to the gurney and dismembering him, just for fairness' sake — but finds that not even that can bring him comfort.

“Isn’t it?” Stregobor says. He waves a hand, and a wide-eyed young apprentice scurries forward with a tray, upon which a small bowl of what looks like broth has been placed. Maybe Julian won’t have to worry about dying again so soon after all. He would be relieved — but he doesn’t trust relief. The rug will be pulled out from under him soon.

“So you’re no longer starving me?” he says as the tray is placed before him. “How kind of you. To what do I owe the thanks?”

“Must you take everything so personally, Julian?” Stregobor says, with a long-suffering sigh. “I have no quarrel with you, and I am not doing this because I _want_ to hurt you. I am a scholar; I run tests, and I record the results, that's all.”

With a hand that shakes, Julian lifts a spoonful of broth to his mouth. It’s watery and only mildly flavoured and almost certainly the best thing he’s ever tasted. He has to exercise an immense amount of restraint to not gulp it all down at once; if he eats too fast, he’ll make himself sick, and he really can’t afford to vomit up the first bit of food he’s been given in what must be weeks.

“They say cat witchers are mad, and you especially so,” Stregobor says, conversationally. “Isn’t that what they call you? The Mad Cat of Kerack?”

“You can't believe everything you hear,” Julian replies. All the blood is rushing to his belly, and it makes him dizzy. His stomach cramps a bit, but he forces himself to finish the bowl. It’s not enough, but if he eats anything more, he knows he’ll only end up getting sick. “Case in point: I had heard about the mirages of naked women, but nobody ever told me that you have the face of a weasel crossed with a goat. Ghastly.”

“The recipe for the mutagens got a little twisted along the way, I was told. Left the Cats volatile and prone to fits of passion, where all the other Witcher Schools strive to dullen their candidates’ emotions.” Stregobor’s quill scratches ceaselessly against the page; Julian abhors the very sound of it. “Would you say that’s true?”

Julian’s mouth is working before his brain has caught up to it. “Yes and no.”

“Oh?” Stregobor looks up. “Do elaborate.”

 _The broth._ Julian curses himself for falling for it — but it’s too late to stop, because he’s already opened his mouth, and words are spilling freely out. “It’s a myth that other witchers don’t feel emotions. They do feel things — they’re just _muted._ Easier to ignore, less pressing, less able to interfere with their decisions. Other witchers aren’t transformed into emotionless husks if they survive the training; all the mutagens do is make them better at compartmentalising their feelings, which, believe me, is necessary when you suffer through the agony of the Trials only to spend the next few centuries wandering a thankless and lonely Path." No matter how hard he tries, Julian _can't stop talking._ "And it’s a myth that Cats are all hopelessly unhinged. We’re just not nearly as good at muting ourselves. They only call me the Mad Cat because I was one of the candidates culled for going crazy after the Trial of the Grasses, when I went berserk and attacked one of the elders — but truthfully, I was never mad. I was just afraid.”

Stregobor catches him by the wrist before he can shove a finger down his throat to try to force himself to throw up. “There’s no point, Julian. It’s already in your system. Unless you want me to restrain your hands to the armrests, hm?”

His grip is clammy and vice-tight; he leans forward in his own chair, and refuses to let Julian’s wrist go. Instead of shrinking back at Stregobor’s touch, Julian decides to take full advantage of the proximity, and lunges. His forehead collides with Stregobor’s nose with a very satisfying _crunch_ — a sound that makes the ache above his eyebrows feel worth it.

Stregobor hisses, drawing back, blood trickling down into his beard, eyes flashing dangerously. Fury is warring with indignation on his shrewd, unpleasant features.

 _Definitely_ worth it. Julian has suffered so much already that anything Stregobor puts him through now can’t be any worse than all the horrors that have come before; he’ll treasure his little rebellions, futile as they might be.

“You think that, now,” Stregobor says in a voice thickened by his broken nose. “But you do not know what I have planned for you next, witcher.”

Julian wonders briefly if he had accidentally spoken aloud before he remembers that Stregobor can read his mind. Instead of responding, he cocks his head to the side. “Witcher? Whatever happened to the two of us being on a first name basis? Such callous demotion! It _wounds_ me, wizard, it really does.”

Stregobor simply pinches the bridge of his nose, taps Julian on the forehead with his other hand, and stalks out of the room.

At something of a loss, alone in the dungeon and simply staring after Stregobor where he so carelessly left the door ajar, Julian does not realise for several long minutes that the belt that keeps him restrained to the chair is loose. 

It’s not a dramatic gap. There’s just a bit of wiggle room, really. In fact, it probably would have fit perfectly at the beginning of this whole ordeal, when he still had a bit of meat on his bones. But after weeks of torture and total starvation, Julian is a lot thinner than he used to be.

He doesn’t stop to think about it. He presses his torso as hard as he can against the backrest, and carefully begins to slump. It’s a slow process, requiring a lot of wiggling, and bending his spine in some very uncomfortable angles. His upper chest is the worst part — for a moment, he’s convinced Stregobor will return to find him caught with the belt stuck under his armpits and his chin, his back trapped on the seat of the chair with his arse hanging off the end of it. All it takes is some deep breathing, and rotating his shoulders to a point where he is almost convinced they’re about to dislocate, and he’s got his arms through. Then, it’s a simple matter of turning his head to the side, and slipping under. He lands at the foot of the chair in a crumpled heap of knees and elbows, exhausted by the effort — but free.

Lightheadedness rushes him the minute he stands up, but he doesn’t have time to waste on being dizzy. Stregobor or one of his simpering little apprentices could be back any minute. He won’t get a chance like this again.

The door suddenly seems very far away; left ajar just to taunt him, the narrow strip of yellow light he can see beyond a tantalising glimpse of freedom.

With a growl of effort, he summons the energy to hurl himself forward, into a run, barefoot over the tiled floor — the floor that has been stained with his blood, the floor that bore witness to a hundred of his deaths — a hundred deaths in this pallid, windowless room, with its vaulted ceiling and its cold metal gurney and the journals filled with observations and the trays of _instruments_ they used to tear him apart — all of it suddenly catching up with him — all that horror he’s done his best to hide from — all the terror he’s buried deep at once rising to chase him out of this horrible, suffocating _laboratory —_

He never wants to see this room again.

Julian reaches the door, throwing it open with trembling arms — a glimpse of deserted hallway — he doesn’t spare more than a glance before throwing himself forward —

And then he is plunged into the black and the cold.

Slimy fingers wrap around his ankle, tugging him down; he can’t breathe. He thrashes, wildly, but more cold, slithery hands clamp down on his wrists, his shoulders, tear ribbons of white pain all down his back — there is a silver moon overhead, the image dashed though with black ripples from underneath, and if he could only reach it — if he could only reach the surface —

But he’s only a boy, and there are so many of them, and they drag him down, down, down, down, until the moon is swallowed by the dark, until his lungs burn and he can’t help but open his mouth and draw a heavy sloshing breath, lakewater like acid in his lungs.

* * *

Yennefer is only gone for a day. It is perhaps one of the longest in Geralt’s life — which, considering he’s closing in on a century, is saying something. It’s been four and a half weeks since he met Gaetan, meaning that Jaskier has been in Stregobor’s clutches for at least three, and Geralt can hardly bear to ponder on what might have been done to him in that time. He can’t stop thinking about the girls born under the Black Sun; hundreds, locked away and dissected and raped and gods-know-what-else. And Jaskier — bright, funny, chatty Jaskier — has been Stregobor's prisoner for _weeks._

He couldn't have stopped this, Geralt reminds himself. Jaskier had wanted to be alone, he reminds himself. Jaskier could take care of himself, he reminds himself.

But he should never have _had_ to. And how he's trapped and alone and entirely at the mercy of a sick, sadistic man with a god complex — and Geralt cannot shake the feeling he could have prevented _all_ of it if he had just _insisted_ that Jaskier stay. If he had never yelled at him on the mountain, if he had never pushed him away, if he had never made him think that he had to lie about who he was for Geralt to tolerate him.

An icy wind blows down from the mountains, rattling the windows of the inn, whistling through the gaps in the walls, fresh and bracing and carrying the promise of snow. Geralt and Ciri should have left a week ago. If they don’t start up the pass to Kaer Morhen in the next few days, they won’t be going at all. And Yen still hasn't reappeared with news of Stregobor, and Jaskier is still trapped and alone and suffering.

“You’re going to wear a hole in the floorboards with all that pacing,” Ciri tells him.

He does not point out that she has been doing plenty of pacing of her own. Her nails are bitten down to the quick; a very unprincesslike habit, not that Geralt much cares. With her short hair and boy’s clothing, they've been doing their best to make her appear as un-royal as possible.

“Please do sit down, Geralt,” she commands, then, in such a regal and commanding voice that he sees it’s all been for naught. There’s enough of Calanthe’s fire left in her for that.

He settles himself on the chair in the corner of their room with a sigh, rubbing at his temples. What he’d _really_ like is a good fight. Swinging a sort at something with horns and too many teeth usually does a wonderful job at calming his nerves. Killing monsters, at least, is always straightforward.

There’s a knock at the door. Geralt smells lilac and gooseberries and is on his feet again before Ciri opens it.

“Well?” he says, voice hoarse.

“I know where he’s keeping him. But getting him out won’t be easy.” Yennefer’s face is tight and pinched. “Stregobor’s tower will be well-guarded.”

“I don’t—”

“I know you don’t care, that you want to just barrel in with swords drawn, but this isn’t your ordinary prison-break, Geralt. If Stregobor catches wind of what we’re planning, he’ll portal Jaskier out of there in an instant.” Yennefer looks exhausted where she slings herself down into the free seat, arms folded on the table. “We’ll need something with a bit more subtlety than that.”

“Have you heard anything about him? About what he’s doing?” Ciri’s voice is small. She’s drawn her knee up to her chest on the bed, worrying at the frayed hem of her trousers.

“Nothing about Jaskier. He’ll be keeping it quiet. People were uncomfortable enough about what he did to the girls born under the Black Sun. Few people count witchers as humans, but even so, Stregobor's experimentation on a witcher still won’t fly with the Chapter — not until he has tangible results, anyway.”

Ciri draws in a sharp breath. “Experimentation?”

“Stregobor fancies himself a scientist, above all else. He’ll run tests on Jaskier. Try to figure out what magic keeps him alive, so that he can replicate it. Mages are functionally immortal, but not invulnerable. If Stregobor figures out how to replicate whatever it is that Jaskier can do, he’ll be the most powerful mage on the Continent.”

Geralt clenches his jaw so hard he's surprised he doesn't break a molar. He _really_ wants to swing a sword at something. “So we need to get Jaskier out. Sooner, rather than later. Have you any ideas?”

Yennefer sighs. “Half-formed ones. We could portal in, but Stregobor’ll sense the foreign magic instantly, so we’d need to be quick about it. Which means we'll need to know precisely where he’s keeping Jaskier, so we can waste no time and portal in and out directly.”

“How do we do that?” Ciri asks.

“Stregobor is a master of illusion,” Yennefer tells them. “You’ve already seen it, Geralt — he conjured up a garden full of girls with very little effort. But he’s proud. Too proud. He’ll assume any magic that attempts to fool him will be just as complex and layered as his own — he’ll be looking for it. So, I propose we use no magic at all.”

“What do you mean?” Ciri is leaning forward now, on the bed. Geralt is privately glad she has the wherewithal to ask Yennefer questions — his own brain is too busy running the idea of _experimentation_ and _Jaskier_ around in a loop.

Whenever he finds Jaskier, he resolves never again to let him out of his sight.

“I mean that we use good old-fashioned disguise,” says Yennefer. She’s looking at him, but Geralt can see how her eyes have the slightly glassy look of someone deep in thought. One perfectly-manicured nail taps on the tabletop. “I think I have an idea. Geralt, you won’t like it. But I think it might have a chance. This is how we save Jaskier.”

"I don't care," Geralt says. "Whatever it is, I'll do it."

He means it, too. Anything to get Jaskier out. Because he's not foolish enough to believe that this is his fault — but he knows, deep in his heart, that it was preventable. That he could have stopped it; that he could have _saved_ him.

He'll do anything. As long as Jaskier's alright.

"Who said anything about _you,_ Geralt?" Yennefer says, expression grim. Her gaze lifts, and turns to Ciri, who still sits with her knees pressed to her chest on her small bed. "How good a liar are you, Princess?"

* * *

Swimming. He has to swim.

He doesn't know how many times he's been through the same thing. Waking alone in the cold depths of the lake, and making a desperate break for the surface, only to get dragged back down at the very last moment. The pattern never changes. But he always falls for it. He always thinks: maybe this is it. Maybe this is the time I get away. Maybe this is the time Mama and Papa come for me. They won't let me drown here forever.

Maybe this is the time I finally die for good.

Like all the other times, he kicks up and off the soft silt of the lakebed; a dark cloud of it billows out around his feet. Sunlight filters down in shimmering beams. It must be a beautiful day. He’ll reach it. He’ll make it this time. He has to. He kicks up and up and up, stretching out his arms, reaching for the daylight; desperate, frantic, and still hopeful enough to _try._

Just as his chest burns with the need to breathe, just as his fingertips skim the rippling surface of the lake, a familiar grip closes slimy and inescapable around his ankle, tugging him down.

He thrashes, writhing, sending up bubbles and sloshing as much as he can — it's the middle of the _day,_ surely someone will see him, surely someone will _save him—_

They can't leave him to drown. Not again. Not again.

Filled with one last burst of energy, he kicks wildly with his trapped foot. His foot collides with the hard head of the creature; the grip on his ankle falters.

He surges up for the surface, bursting into bright, blinding sunlight, lake water pouring down his face, stinging his eyes, a ragged breath of cool summer air dragged in so deep it might pop his aching lungs like balloons.

 _“HELP!”_ he screams, kicking wildly for the shore. “Please, somebody _help me!”_

The drowners are dark shapes underneath him in the water; an entire throng of them. He won't make to the shoreline in time. He won’t make it; he needs help.

And just as a crowd of fingers and claws and horrible snapping teeth snatch him by the feet, just as the greenish water closes in around his head, shutting him off from light and sound, just as he is dragged irrevocably down down down and back into the dark —

A pair of hands reach into the water and _grab him._

The drowners’ grip slips, and the strong hands, human hands, familiar hands, gather him up and lift him out of the water and into the daylight. The drowners scatter, their shadows dispersing under the water like startled fish — but it is such a bright and sunny day, he must have been a fool to imagine there were ever monsters here at all. Not on a day like this, not with Geralt, who gathers him close and lets him bury his head into his chest as he carries him ashore. He trembles against a familiar black linen shirt, wet with lakewater, listening to that slow metronome of a heartbeat — until Geralt sets him upon his feet on the banks of the lake, teeth chattering, trembling from head to toe.

He’s grown, suddenly.

He was sure he had been a boy in the water — only six years old, and small for his age besides. Now he’s a scant inch shorter than Geralt, and filled out. Strength brims just under the surface of his skin — though, by the way his knees still shake, threatening at any moment to buckle, it isn’t much use to him. The boy in the lake is gone.

It doesn’t seem worthwhile to question it.

“Julian,” Geralt says.

“I’m so— glad you’re here, Geralt. I don’t— I don't know how many times I—”

“Shh,” Geralt says, gathering him close. “Shh. It’s alright now, Julian. It’s alright now.”

“Thank you — I—”

“Don’t worry about it. Hush, now, Julian. I need your help with something.”

“You— anything— you know I’ll give you anything—”

Geralt’s smile is too open, too toothy. Too practiced. Maybe he’s been smiling more in Julian’s absence; maybe that’s the reason why it splits his face so easily, with such little coaxing. Geralt smiles with his eyes, not with his mouth; this one is the exact opposite, and looks uncanny and alien, almost like it has been transplanted onto his features. 

He doesn't know how he gets there, but between one juddering breath and the next, the sunny lakeside is gone. 

Tiles on a vaulted ceiling. He knows the pattern intimately. Cold metal, cuffed wrists and ankles. The smell of chemicals.

His heart sinks.

He is still soaking wet where he lies on the gurney. Lakewater puddles underneath him on the chilly steel surface of the table; damp clumps his eyelashes together, and plasters his clothes to his skin. Geralt stands over him. He is wearing a leather apron and holding a saw. The serrated edges glimmer in the clinical lighting of the dungeon laboratory.

“Will you help me, Julian?” he asks.

“How — how will this _help?”_ Julian gasps. “Geralt— how will this help you?”

“You said it yourself, once.” There is a cruel curl to Geralt’s lip when next he speaks. “You’re terribly hard to get rid of.”

“Geralt.” He hates the break in his voice; he sounds close to tears. But Geralt — Geralt has never been cruel to him. Insulting, and rude, and unpleasant, and gruff — but not cruel. Not like this. Not since the mountain.

Geralt’s eyes light up. “The mountain?”

Julian turns his head away. He can’t bear to look at him. He still hears the words echo through his head — _if life could give me one blessing…_

“Why don’t you tell me, then, Julian,” Geralt whispers, voice a horrible, gravelly sort of croon, “how we might discover just how you came to be so _impossible_ to get rid of? Why don’t you dive deep, and tell me about that strange magic at the core of you?”

“Not much to it. Stubborn as an ass,” Julian rasps. “Or so I’ve been told.” His heart isn't in it. He doesn’t sound even convinced to his own ears.

Geralt’s smile disappears.

“If you insist,” he says, with that thin, toothy smile that is not his own. Then he begins to saw.

* * *

The tightly-fitted belt is cutting into Julian’s belly where he arches off the seat with a scream. His throat feels ragged — he must have been screaming for a while. He doesn’t remember.

“Oh, do calm down,” Stregobor says, impatient.

All the strength leaves him with a huff. He drags his knees up to press his face into them, digging his heels into the seat of the chair and wrapping his arms around himself as if that could soothe his pounding heart — pounding as much as a witcher’s heart ever could.

He still tastes lakewater at the back of his throat.

“That last bit, I’ll admit, was in revenge for my nose. Not my best deception, since I believe you caught on to the trick in the end. But you won’t begrudge me my bit of fun before the real work begins, will you, witcher?”

Julian doesn’t look up from his knees. His stomach cramps with hunger, but he doesn’t have the slightest desire to eat.

“Blessed silence, at last?” Stregobor needles. “No wonder Geralt of Rivia was so keen to see the back of you. You really do never shut up. So many words, and yet so little of value said — I think I learned more from that brief foray into your head than I learned from all previous attempts at interrogation.”

Julian ignores him. The hard curve of his kneecaps pressing against his forehead — that’s real. The rough, dry fabric of his trousers, no sign of lakewater, no smell of blood — that’s real. His fingers where they dig into his calves — real.

“Oh, Julian,” Stregobor says, softer. “I’m in your head now, so you may as well give up on that endeavour entirely. Illusion, dream, fantasy — those are my realms. This is where I thrive. And we’re only just getting started.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Specific trigger warnings for one description of drowning. Jaskier attempts to induce vomiting when he realises his food has been drugged with some kind of truth serum. Stregobor creates an illusion of Geralt who replaces Stregobor in a flashback-type nightmare of the experiments that were conducted on Jaskier.
> 
> I'm so sorry for all the relentless misery... On the bright side, we are drawing to the end of the "first part" of this fic as I've been referring to it in my head. Things might not be GOOD but they will be slightly less BAD very soon, I promise.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ((Warning in this chapter for Stregobor being a creepy old man. He doesn't DO anything, but the implication is there that he could.))

There is somebody in his head.

He lies flat on his back on the soft mattress, blankets tugged up to his shoulders. Oxenfurt rooms; comfortable and warm. Safe. He’s closed the curtains of the four-poster bed and shut himself away in his little pocket of darkness, but he knows. He feels it like a foreign object. An itch, a lump, a cold and wriggling thing at the back of his mind. A flash of grey eyes at the very edges of his vision. The smell of blood and thunder; rot-water and roses.

Then he realises that there’s a woman in his bed. Given how fond he is of having women in his bed, he really isn’t sure how he hadn’t noticed earlier.

“What scar is this?”

The Countess de Stael had never been a particularly big fan of Oxenfurt, which is the most glaring reason why he can't quite account for how she came to be here, delightfully naked in his bed, his sheets gathered at the dip of her waist. He ought to be wearing his glamour — she should not to be able to see his scars, let alone comment on them. But the bed is warm and his tongue is loose, as if he’s been drinking White Gull or some such potion much stronger than wine, and she is all gently curving breasts and warm breath and soft voice, her fingertips tracing ever-so-gently over the whorls of hair on his chest. Like a man in a pleasant dream, he accepts it.

“Knife,” he tells her. “Dagger nearly to the heart while rescuing a young lady from bandits, it was all terribly dangerous. I’m lucky to be alive.”

_It’s alright, kitten, Gaetan shushes him. You’ll be alright. The bite of the cold blade in between his ribs, but all he can feel is the way Gaetan rocks him a little, like he’s still a small child and not a half-grown boy of fourteen. Hush, hush, Julian. Perhaps the older witcher is crying — but the sky above is dimming to dark, and Julian can't see all that well anymore._

“So brave. How did you survive?” she says, dragging him out of his thoughts as she presses a kiss to the curve of his shoulder.

“You know that I’m _very_ persistent,” he replies, and rolls over so that he’s suddenly on top of her, pressing her down into the sheets beneath him until she shrieks in delight.

But he can’t relax, can’t get into it, can’t dispel the sensation of some foreign hand rooting around in his metaphorical drawers while he’s here, distracted by the smell and the taste of her, the rustle of sheets and the huffed-out breaths.

“Shh,” the Countess says, as if she can sense his unease, winding her arms around his neck and drawing him closer, her body supple and warm and inviting beneath his. The very bed seems to fold in around them, cocooning them, comfortable and gorgeously cosy. Quiet, and safe. Lulling him, rocking him, embracing him, as if he is sinking down into the softness of it — sinking, darkness folding around him — a feeling he knows — knows far too well —

Sinking into the dark. _It’s alright, kitten._

Why the hell he’s thinking of his brother, of bloody _Gaetan,_ killing him at a lovely time like this—

Why is the Countess de Stael in his Oxenfurt bed?

“No,” he says, suddenly. That invisible foreign hand grips him by the throat; a shadow watches from the corner. He feels as though he might vomit. “No—”

He lunges backwards, away from the Countess, her expression a mixture of hurt and shock — draws back until his bent knee slides off the edge of the mattress and the world tilts and he’s toppling head over heels through the curtains and backwards into the shock of hungry black water, back into the freezing cold.

* * *

“Do you know what the first rule of deception is, Ciri?”

Geralt scowls over at Jaskier where he strolls alongside Roach, just out of nipping range and matching her pace with ease. Pegasus isn’t with him, which is generally a dead giveaway that he won’t be staying for long, as he can’t, presumably, stow him in a stable somewhere forever. Not that Geralt would put it past him, after the various revelations regarding his age, his occupation, and his utter inability to die — but life on the Path simply does not pay well enough to stable a large horse indefinitely, not to mention the fact that Jaskier had of late been much more occupied with tracking Nilfgaard’s movements than with taking contracts to kill monsters for money.

“Keep track of your lies?” Ciri suggests. She's still got her long hair hidden under a cap, but she's been talking about cutting it off in order to better commit to her disguise of being a boy, which is how this whole horrible topic of discussion had started.

“Well, yes, but that ought to follow on from the first rule. It’s got a lot more to do with technique than with memory. If you can remember the golden rule, you can keep track of your lies much easier.”

“How do you mean?” Ciri shifts a little where she sits behind Geralt, tired and sore from a long day on horseback. They’ll soon stop for the night, he decides.

Geralt tells himself that Jaskier's presence has nothing to do with that decision — but, truthfully, the direction the conversation is taking has plenty. He’d really rather not dwell on Jaskier’s skills of deception, not when he matches Roach’s long-legged gait with neither misstep nor complaint, and not when he’s got two swords strapped to his back instead of his lute — the lute, Geralt remembers, that lies gathering dust in his room in Kaer Morhen, like some sort of broken monument to two decades’ worth of lies.

So no. He doesn’t like the direction of this conversation at all.

Jaskier, of course, barrels onwards regardless. “The trick, really, is to say as little as possible. As little as is _plausible._ A big, elaborate lie is always much flimsier than a couple of mild untruths here and there. Really, what you’ve got to do is let them fill in the blanks. The mind is an extraordinary thing, and it’ll rush to account for all sorts of minor inconsistencies as long as you're not acting suspicious over it.”

“So, small lies are better than big ones?” Ciri asks.

“Exactly. And keep them as close to the truth as you can. As close as is safe.”

“Is that what they teach you in the Cat School?” Geralt interrupts. “How to lie? Or is that just something you perfected on your own?”

Jaskier appears entirely unperturbed by the venom in Geralt’s tone, but Geralt catches the way he huffs out a breath, cheeks hollowing a little and eyes gone glinty. “Well, it saved my skin more than once. And our darling Cirilla here is going to have to get quite good at lying if she wants to keep one step ahead of Nilfgaard, isn’t she?”

And, well. Geralt can hardly argue with _that._

After they make camp, Jaskier has Ciri sit on a fallen log while he hacks away at her hair with a hunting knife. Her ash-blonde waves stand out like threads of silver where they fall amongst the burnt colours of the fallen leaves. Jaskier, unsurprisingly, does a much better job than Geralt would have; the cropped length is cut evenly and tidily, while still managing to leave enough of it to ruffle into waves between his hands. Ciri bats him away with a laugh, and before entertaining the two of them with her disastrous attempts to adopt a deeper voice to go with her new look.

“Precisely what I meant when I said not to make your disguises too elaborate,” Jaskier tells her, stifling another laugh. “You’ll only _draw_ attention to yourself by looking like a silver birch sprig inexplicably endowed with the voice of a chain-smoking blacksmith who gargles gravel every evening.”

“I was just trying to sound like Geralt,” Ciri objects. 

“I don’t sound like a chain-smoking blacksmith who gargles gravel every evening.”

“Of course not, Geralt,” Jaskier says, in a mollifying tone, winking at Ciri.

“Hm.” Geralt returns his attention to repairing the stirrup leather on Roach’s tack, looking away from Ciri and Jaskier where they sit conspiratorially close on the other side of the fire. Her new hair isn’t terrible, much as Geralt resents adding “hairstylist” to Jaskier’s list of unexpected talents. She doesn’t look an awful lot like a boy — her features are a little too delicate for that — but she doesn’t look much like a princess anymore, either, which is the most important part.

It's easy to ignore the two of them, though his ill mood has very little to do with the comment about gargling gravel. Every time he thinks about all the ways in which Jaskier had deceived him, all the little _mistruths_ here and there, all the careful lies of omission and misdirection, his very stomach seems to curl up with fury in his gut. He had thought he was over it — had thought he could let it go — but turns out that accepting something doesn’t necessarily mean forgiving it. And it wasn’t as if he had been some entirely guileless victim here; he’d been plenty cruel to Jaskier himself over the years, and Jaskier was smart to keep certain things from him. Geralt isn't a bigot or anything, but he knows he’s not immune to propaganda, and he’s harboured plenty of misgivings about the Cat and the Viper witchers’ ill-repute. He understands _why_ Jaskier lied. He just—

He just isn’t quite sure how to begin to trust him again.

He catches Jaskier’s gaze, heavy with some unspoken question, on the other side of the fire. He just shakes his head, minutely, and returns to his task, giving it a lot more attention than it probably warrants.

Jaskier gets to his feet with a sigh. “Well, then,” he says. “Best be off.”

“Any other tips and tricks before you go, Jaskier?” Ciri asks, cheerfully.

“Mmm,” Jaskier says, thoughtful. “Keep your head.”

“What do you mean?”

Yellow eyes, slow blink, a smile with no humour in it. “Don’t get so caught up in the disguise, in the lies, that you start to believe them yourself. A certain amount of self-belief is needed to be adequately convincing. But you’ve got to keep your head, and not forget who it is you really are. Otherwise you’ll be in for a rude awakening whenever it all falls apart. And it will fall apart, Ciri. Things always do.”

Ciri, whose eyes, when her gaze retreats, still flicker with the fires of Cintra’s fall, doesn’t need to be told that. But she nods, anyway.

Geralt suspects not much of the speech was for her, anway. It doesn’t matter, however, because Jaskier turns and leaves without another word. Geralt listens to his footsteps — loud like a human’s, deliberately so — until they fade from all hearing in the night, the bite of approaching autumn hanging heavy in the air.

* * *

“Absolutely not,” Geralt says. “Find another way.”

The two women level him with the exact same unamused glare. 

“If you’ve got a better idea, Geralt,” Yennefer says, voice thin, “I’m all ears. But Stregobor will catch on instantly if either of us try and break in. He doesn’t know who Ciri is.”

“Which is how it ought to _stay,”_ Geralt says, emphatically. “Yen — you don’t know what he did. What he’s like. All of his sick little illusions. He’s got a whole garden full of —” He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, and lets out a long, blustery breath. “It would be like throwing Ciri into a nest of snakes. I’m not allowing it.”

“That’s the only reason it’ll work,” Yennefer says, gently. “Stregobor will look at her and all he’ll see is a traumatised little girl. He won’t be expecting us. And I can attach a passive charm to track Ciri, that’ll let us know the minute anything goes wrong. It’s the only way, Geralt.”

“Besides,” Ciri pipes up, with a steely look to her pale eyes. “I’m not defenceless. And I know how to make a lie convincing. Jaskier taught me himself.”

A flickering fire, and a gaze full of unspoken things. Geralt remembers. He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees, spine a taut line of tension. He knows when he’s lost. “Anything goes wrong — _anything,_ Yennefer — and you portal in there and get her out.”

“Of course,” Yennefer says, reaching over to lay a hand on his wrist. “I’m as uncomfortable with this as you are, Geralt. But we won’t let anything happen to her.”

When Geralt nods, it’s only a tiny movement. But it feels as though it takes about as much effort as tackling a warhorse to the ground.

“For Jaskier,” Ciri reminds him.

“For Jaskier,” he agrees.

* * *

It’s dark when Geralt fishes Julian from the lake. There is no moon, but a breathtaking abundance of stars, scattered over the heavens, thick as a jewelled tapestry. Bundling Julian into his cloak, Geralt sets to making camp far from the shoreline. Julian was almost certain the lake had been in the grounds of the Lettenhove estate, but there is no sign of the house in which he grew up. He attributes the confusion to the fact that everything looks different in the dark. Instead, Geralt carried him out of the water and into the thick of some nameless wood, indistinguishable from the hundreds of others they’d passed through in their twenty years of travelling together.

“Are you alright?” Geralt asks, once a fire is cracking merrily between them and Julian’s trembling has ceased. “You haven't said a word since...”

Julian tries to flash Geralt his nicest smile. But, truthfully, he’s not alright, and it’s not just the leftover wobbles from his series of watery deaths. He’s certain there’s something very important he’s forgotten, something he needs to be wary of, but he can’t adequately explain that to Geralt without sounding like a madman. And he’s sick of sounding like a madman.

He feels like he’s done this all already. It’s a creeping sort of déja vu, some prickling unease that settles in the pit of his belly and curls up there.  
He says, “I’m fine. Just cold, really. I smell like drowner guts and I’ve probably got a whole lot of algae in my hair.”

“In the lake,” Geralt begins, slow and halting, as if he’s unsure of what he’s trying to say. “You said you’d been in there a while.”

“Hm,” Jaskier says, hoping Geralt might catch on to the fact that he really does not want to talk about this.

“How long?”

No such luck, of course.

But — hadn’t he told Geralt about this before? Didn’t Geralt already know? Didn’t Geralt know about all of it; all of the secrets that had built up over the years, like bricks stacking up to form an impenetrable fortress, building a keep so large that its eventual fall would crush every good thing he’d managed to make in it to rubble and dust?

Or maybe that was just a dream. He can’t remember any of the details. Maybe he had never told Geralt at all — maybe that lie, too, still hung over him, dark as a cloud. Maybe none of this could be trusted. Maybe he _was_ just as mad as they said he was. His memories feel very disorganised, like the tapestry of his life has been rucked-up and scrunched into a ball, and he can’t tell where he begins and where he ends.

“How long were you in the lake, Julian?” Geralt asks.

 _Julian._ Geralt had never called him that, not even when he told him that was his real name, sometime between the djinn and the dragon hunt, tongue-in-cheek, half-honest and half-lie. Julian is a very good liar, and being a good liar is mostly about knowing when to tell the truth, however twisted a version of the truth it might be.

So he says: “A long time. Days, maybe.”

“How does it work?” Geralt rumbles.

A flash—

 _Tell me how it works. Tell me how you still live, Julian?_ He remembers how the colourless eyes peer into his, searching ceaselessly for something they’ll never find. _Tell me how it works._ Knife in the hand, magic on the breath, a hundred ceiling-tiles. They’ll burn him alive again, next, or cut off his legs, or suck out his guts, or fill him up with poison. They don’t even have to worry about keeping him alive. Drip, drip, drip of blood from his fingertips. _How does it work? How did you come to live forever? How did you banish Death?_

I don't know.

I don't know.

Believe me, please. I don't know.

_Why won't the boy die? Why can’t we be rid of him? Like a cockroach, like a pest, he just keeps coming back._

_Why won’t the boy die?_

“I don’t know,” Julian whispers.

“Julian,” Geralt grumbles, disappointment tugging his mouth into a frown. “Do you not trust me? Even after all these years?”

“Do you trust _me?”_ Julian shoots back. “As I recall, that was the primary issue here.”

He doesn’t know how he recalls that. There must be a specific reason — an instance which had led him to believe that Geralt must be angry, that Geralt no longer trusts him — but he just can’t bring to mind any of the details. It’s all muddled up, familiar but wrong, like somebody has broken into his home and moved all the furniture around.

“You’re impossible,” Geralt is poking the fire moodily with a stick, sending up a shower of sparks, bright as his eyes in the dark woods, as though the vision is heightened by fever or embellished by a poetic slant of thought.

“Yes, well, I try my best.” Julian doesn't want to fight with Geralt. He’s too tired for that. So instead, he sinks back down to lie on his back and look up at the stars. There are a lot of them out tonight — and that’s not right. Julian is no astronomer, but he’s been a traveller for long enough to be familiar with the way the sky tilts throughout the seasons. Now, he tracks the familiar glittering studs of the Huntsman and the Fox, of Melitele’s Necklace, of a host of constellations that barely peep above the horizon this time of year.

He opens his mouth to ask Geralt what month it is — but then, decides against it. A cold, wriggling feeling right at the back of his mind. He sits up in one smooth movement.

“You’re not Geralt.”

Geralt has never frightened him. He pretended, of course, whenever he needed to, in order to maintain the whole helpless bard act — but Julian has always been a very good witcher. Even if Geralt is stronger, Julian is faster. He can always run.

Geralt frightens him now. He sits very still, face twisted into a horrible sort of smile. His eyes are dimmer than they should be.

And the cloak that Julian is wrapped in has gotten very wet. Lakewater squelches out of the sodden fabric every time he moves. He thinks about running — only the cloak gets tighter, as if it is possessed with a life of its own, as if it means to trap him within its folds, immobilised as a swaddled baby. He wants to run, but he can't.

“It doesn’t matter, Julian,” Geralt says, in a voice that isn’t Geralt’s voice at all. “It doesn't matter how many times we do this. You’re already unravelling, unravelling too fast for it to stop. We’ll peel back all the layers and get to the core of it all soon, I can guarantee it.”

Paralysed with terror, his throat closes up. He couldn’t reply even if he wanted to. And the water is rising — the black water is at his waist, now, and rising still, as though the far-off lake is flooding or the very earth is sinking — and Julian can't move.

Not-Geralt smiles a toothy smile.

And the ground disappears from under Julian, abruptly, as he plunges down into the cold depths of the lake, shadows splitting off around him, shadows with teeth and claws. And he can't stop it. He can't save himself. They're going to drown him, they're going to eat him, just like they have a hundred, a thousand times before.

His life peels away from him. The lake is all there is. Stregobor — Gaetan — the Countess — Ciri — Geralt — All of them, gone. Distant and insubstantial as ghosts.

He's alone in the lake. And he’s only six years old.

* * *

Ciri hates the way Stregobor looks at her. She's seen that sort of look before, of course, in the refugee camps, or when she was running wild in the countryside, or even in court once or twice —though she expects that if it had been obvious, her grandmother would’ve had the perpetrator’s head for it. Men whose eyes linger a little too long on her, whose gazes raise prickling goosebumps all along the back of her neck. Some sixth sense had kicked in whenever she turned old enough to be noticed; a constant, ceaseless need for awareness, for carefulness, for wariness. Being with Geralt, or perhaps being disguised as a boy, or more likely both, had banished the need for it of late. But Ciri hasn’t forgotten the heavy, loaded sensation of being _looked at._ She doubts she ever will. And she knows what it means that Stregobor does it to her now; knows that the way his gaze picks her apart where she stands in the middle of his richly furnished office, surrounded by marble busts of naked women and bowls of fruit, bodes very ill.

“And you want a job?” he asks. Slow, careful tone; she thinks it’s meant to be reassuring, but it just ends up sounding a little condescending.

Her own voice trembles. “I don’t have anywhere else to go — they said, at the village, that you have jobs for girls, sometimes.” She tugs a little self-consciously at her cropped hair, not that it ever made her look very masculine to begin with, and hopes she looks pitiful enough.

“I do,” Stregobor says. He gives her another once-over. It turns her stomach, but she thinks of Jaskier, and she stands firm. “Is there anything you’re good at?”

She smiles. “I can deliver messages, or spy, or play knucklebones. I’m very good at those.”

None a lie. And Stregobor will look at her, a slip of a girl standing shakily in his office, and draw his own conclusions.

“I’ll do anything you like,” she adds. “I just — it’s getting so cold, and I need a place to stay. The war took everything from me. I don’t have anything left. I just —” She takes another shaky breath. “I just need some help.”

“Of course,” Stregobor says, immediately, coming to stand. “Of course I’ll help you, darling.”

She has to try really hard not to flinch at the pet name. There is a charm on her necklace that is attuned to everything that’s going on, and she knows Geralt will be furious at this — at the silky-softness of Stregobor’s voice, and the hand he lays firmly on her shoulder — but she’s here for a reason, and he and Yennefer won’t teleport in until they’re certain of where Jaskier is.

Stregobor’s tower is not very large. It looks bigger from the outside, she thinks, but it’s just a veneer. Most of his various apprentices and servants are housed on the ground floor; the upper areas of the tower Stregobor has reserved for himself alone. There is a dungeon — she sees the door as she is led past — but she doesn’t know how extensive it is. All in all, it’s not the hardest place to suss out. There are only a few places to look.

The apprentice who leads her to her supposed quarters is a sneering young man who frightens her just as much as Stregobor does. She keeps her grip on the folding knife stowed in the waistband of her trousers the entire time, but her fears prove unfounded when she is brought to her quarters to find she’ll be sharing with a group of blank-eyed young women. The apprentice can’t try anything here. Not that the other girls seem all that watchful; they regard her with strangely empty gazes, all dressed in the same plain grey dress.

“You’ll be here until the Master decides what you’re good for,” the apprentice says, with a poisonous sort of voice. _His_ gaze makes it fairly clear exactly what he thinks she’ll be good for.

Ciri wishes suddenly that Yennefer were here. Yennefer seems like the sort of person who would know exactly how to react to this, and how to fight back. How, more accurately, to _gaze_ back, and make it clear to them that she’s not just a — not just a pretty thing to ogle at. That she has teeth, and she’ll bite. Some women have that power. Her grandmother did. Grief raises its ugly head again as Ciri finds herself longing, suddenly and with fervour, that her grandmother had gotten to live long enough to teach her what the secret was. The secret to not allowing men to make you feel so much lesser with something so _little_ as a _look._

But Yennefer isn't here, and Calanthe is dead, so Ciri lifts her chin and stares him dead in the eye until he leaves.

* * *

The stables. His mother. The first time he was chased from a village, stones and jeering insults thrown at his retreating back. The caravan in flames, and the children all slaughtered, and old Guxart’s severed head rolling. The smell of smoke. The knife at his throat. The djinn. Drinking with Joël. His botched assassination of a Redanian lord. Aiden’s broken leg when Kiyan knocked him from the tightrope. The little girl who held his sword in one hand and her father’s wrist in the other and told him he was dead.

Geralt, in a hundred different places a hundred times over.

All of it feels as real as if it is happening to him now — but with that strange, dreamlike quality where all the odd inconsistencies are so very easy to disregard. His eyes slide past the gaps in his vision; he ignores the alarm bells ringing in his ears — until he can't anymore.

And then all the dreams end the same way: in the black waters of the lake.

It’s as if he never escaped at all.

It’s as if he never will.

* * *

Ciri changes into the grey dress she is given, but keeps her boots on and stows the folding knife in her sleeve. She tucks the enchanted necklace that broadcasts her location to Geralt and Yennefer, lying in wait just beyond the tower’s wards, under the hem of her neckline and out of sight. It was only early afternoon when she arrived, so there’s plenty yet to be done with the day.

The three other girls are all very different in looks, but clones in personality — insofar as they each appear to have none. They don’t even talk amongst themselves as Ciri shadows them at their work, which appears to consist mostly of cooking and cleaning. Ciri is surprised Stregobor doesn’t just conjure himself up his meals, and vanish all the dirt, but apparently it isn’t that easy — or perhaps he just likes the idea of having servants.

The girls’ identically docile personalities do begin to disturb Ciri after a while, though. They’re perfectly nice to her, but in a bland sort of way, as if they hardly register that she’s there at all. There’s no mention of any prisoner, she notices, but she isn’t foolish enough to ask. The apprentice from earlier passes her in the halls and leers, and she knows she’s being watched.

So, despite never having done a day’s domestic work before in her life, Ciri dutifully scrubs out a pot at the sink as one of the other girls, a mousy brunette called Martyna, stirs what appears to be some kind of broth at the stove, and does her best to appear quiet and attentive, despite the fact that she doesn’t know how to make the grease come off.

“Is the Master adding anything to this one?” Agata asks Martyna, toneless and mild, as she peers into the broth. Then, “Fiona, do you know where to find the dish soap?”

Dish soap. Of course. If either of them had half a brain, they’d have noticed that she had a noblewoman’s smooth hands. If either of them had half a brain, they’d notice she doesn’t have the faintest notion of how to clean a bloody pot. But they’re both hollow as a pair of grey-clad dolls, and Agata only hands her the small bar of dish-soap at the edge of the sink with a vague little smile before turning back to Martyna.

“I don’t know,” Martyna says, still stirring idly. “Olaf didn’t say. Just that the witcher needed to be fed again.”

Ciri drops the pot into the sink. A miniature tidal wave of soapy water slops out to soak the front of her dress, staining the grey fabric dark. She only just stops herself from cursing in a _very_ unladylike manner; maybe she is spending too much time with Geralt after all.

“Witcher?” she asks, careful to keep her tone light, as if her inquiry is merely professional.

“Yes. He’s being weaned back onto food. He can only really manage broth at the moment,” Martyna says, with about as much interest as someone discussing the weather. “Perhaps in a while we’ll have to make something more substantial, but not yet.”

Agata just hums in insipid agreement.

Ciri decides their lack of animation is flat-out creepy. She had wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, but there’s no other word for it. “Didn’t know there was a witcher here.”

“Yes. Don’t worry, we don’t have to go down to see him. The Master only allows the apprentices into the room.” Agata sounds as though she is making some attempt toward sounding reassuring, but it barely makes a dent in the dullness of her demeanour.

They’re like knives that have been blunted into spoons, Ciri thinks. She wonders if Stregobor is planning on doing the same thing to her, and suppresses a shudder.

More importantly, though, is that Agata had said Ciri wouldn’t have to go _down_ to see him. And since the kitchen is on the ground floor already, that means only one thing.

Jaskier is in the dungeon.

* * *

Ciri is barely in Stregobor’s tower for an afternoon before she’s figured out where Jaskier is. Geralt would be proud if he wasn’t too busy being terrified. He _wishes_ that it were true that witchers have no emotions; he’d have spent a much more pleasant afternoon crouching in the grasses outside the tower with Yennefer if that were the case. As it stands, he’s got an ache in his jaw from clenching it, and his stomach feels just about ready to vacate his body through his mouth.

“—Just need to figure out a way to get down there without anyone noticing—” Ciri’s whispered voice sounds over the connection with the enchanted necklace. It's a minor enough magic that Stregobor has apparently not even noticed it. The same can’t be said of one of Yennefer’s portals, however — they’ll have to time things perfectly if they want to get in and out without getting caught.

“Don’t rush into it,” Yennefer advises. “You can’t afford to be careless. Do whatever is necessary, but only if you’re sure it’s safe. I’m sure Jaskier can wait a little longer.”

“I know— shit, someone’s coming. Gotta go, promise I’ll check in again soon!”

Her voice fizzles out. Geralt hisses, jaw still clenched. He really is going to do irreparable damage to his molars soon.

Yennefer reaches over and squeezes his wrist. She isn't usually the comforting type, but he appreciates the gesture regardless.

“I’m still angry with you,” she reminds him. She does not, however, lift her hand from his.

“Yen…” he begins, even if now is _not_ the time for this conversation.

She shakes her head, cutting him off with a rueful sort of smile. “I’m _angry,_ Geralt. That’s all. I don’t need to hear an apology, or even an explanation. I get why you did it, and I understand. I don’t hate you or anything, I’m just… I’m just going to need a bit of time to cool off, I think. Get all my thoughts in order. I need to figure out how much of our relationship was _me,_ how much of it was my choice and my feelings and my desires, and how much of it was the djinn, before I can even begin to think about how I want to move forward with it.” 

“I—”

“You don't need to say anything,” she interrupts, squeezing his hand. “And besides, you’ve got plenty of other relationship woes to keep yourself occupied, don’t you?”

He shakes his head a little, at a loss for what she could mean.

“Oh, Geralt,” she huffs, crossly, “just how blind are you?”

“What?”

“Do you mean to tell me you’d send your Child Surprise, however reluctantly, into — what was it? “A nest of snakes”? — for just anyone?”

“I would for you,” he objects, but she’s already shaking her head.

“I _know_ you would do it for me. Because you love me. And you would do it for Jaskier — you literally just _have_ done it for Jaskier.” Her violet eyes are wide, almost beseeching, as if she can’t quite comprehend how he isn’t getting it. “Please put two and two together, Geralt.”

He purses his lips, and looks away. “I already knew that,” he says, and can’t help sounding a little huffy about it. “I do — I do know my own mind, Yennefer. Things have been — odd. Different. Between us. For weeks.”

“Yet you've done nothing about it,” Yenneder points out.

“Well, neither has he.”

“Jaskier is convinced you still hate him. Of course he hasn’t done anything.”

“Sometimes I _do_ still hate him,” Geralt says.

“Do you usually fret this much over people you hate?”

“He’s a special case.”

She snorts a laugh at that — his favourite laugh, her most raw and honest laugh — and bumps her shoulder against his. “We’ll get him out, Geralt,” she promises. “Not long now.”

“Hm,” is all the answer he can manage, as the two of them watch the watery winter sun sink below the horizon, Stregobor’s tower bathed in red and gold. They sit in companionable silence, then, for several hours more.

* * *

Ciri calls them in the middle of the night. Neither of them have slept, of course, waiting on tenterhooks in the knolls of grass, breath puffing out in the cold.

“I’m sneaking down now,” she whispers. “I don't know if there are going to be any guards on the door. How soon can you portal in?”

“Instantaneously,” Yennefer says swiftly. “Be careful, Ciri.”

“I will.”

They listen to her careful footsteps on the stairs, her breathing hushed. The connection is so strong Geralt can even hear the hummingbird-quick flutter of her heartbeat. It doesn't do much to reassure him.

“I'm here,” she whispers. “They haven't even got a guard on the door. They really must not be expecting anyone to come for him.”

None of them dwell on that.

They hear the heavy creak as Ciri pushes the door open. They hear her sharp intake of breath. They hear her rush over a tiled floor, saying, “In here, he’s in here, oh gods —”

Yennefer has the portal open before Geralt can even blink; he barrels through with such furious force that he collides immediately with what looks like a metal gurney — not unlike the one he had been strapped to while he suffered through the Trial of the Grasses — colliding with it so hard that it topples over onto its side with an earsplitting crash of steel against tile. If Stregobor hasn’t been alerted to their presence by the rush of foreign magic that is Yennefer’s portal, he certainly will be now; there’s not a soul in the tower who won't have heard their arrival.

“So much for subtlety, Geralt,” Yennefer remarks, coming through the portal behind him, but he isn’t listening.

“He’s here, he’s over here—” Ciri, dressed in an unfamiliar grey outfit, is babbling through tears. She leans over a wicked-looking metal chair, expression stricken and helpless as she looks back at him. As Geralt strides forward towards her, he catches a glimpse of lank brown hair from over her narrow shoulder.

_Jaskier._

He is slumped in the chair, a thick leather belt restraining him to the seat, his head lolling onto his shoulder and his eyes closed. He doesn't even stir at the rattle of the falling gurney, or at Ciri’s shriek, her hands digging into his shoulders. Whatever Stregobor has done to him has him out for the count, his face pale and drawn and expression unsettled even asleep.

They hear shouts from overhead; hurried footsteps echoing as Stregobor’s various cronies are alerted to the intrusion — but Geralt isn’t listening. He’s too busy staring at Jaskier, at the lifeless loll of his head, the slow pulse at his throat, the steady rise and fall of his chest. He’s in bad shape, but he’s _alive._ There’s no way he wouldn't be, given his ability, of course, but it still settles something deep in Geralt’s chest to see it as he rushes forward to join Ciri by the horrible chair.

He's thin. That's the second thing Geralt sees. It wasn’t as if Jaskier had ever been an especially large man, but he’d never been terribly small, either. Even when he was still pretending to be a harmless bard, there was always a quiet strength to him; a certain solidity, maybe. Now, he looks gaunt. There’s no sign of blood, nor of injury — but there wouldn't be, would there? Geralt had seen the arrow wound that had killed Jaskier after he rescued himself and Ciri reduced to nothing but a long-healed scar the minute he revived.

And now, Jaskier has a lot of new scars. Geralt crouches next to Ciri, hands hovering over Jaskier’s limp form. He can see the silver line tracing the entire line of his neck, thick and ropey, as if the wound was jagged and the flesh torn — nothing like the clean curve of the faded slit in his throat beneath that. As if—

As if they had cut his head off.

“Hurry up!” Yennefer says, sharply. She’s holding their escape portal between her palms, ready to cast it; her hair blows wildly behind her, and for just a moment, she reminds him of the maddened sorceress he’d first met six years previous, fearless and beautiful and utterly insane in her attempts to cage the power of a djinn. 

Jaskier had been hurt then, too.

Geralt doesn't know where he finds the strength. Maybe in any ordinary situation, he wouldn't have. But the sight of Jaskier looking so prone and vulnerable on the chair — his drawn face, eyelids dark as bruises, hair lank and the way, despite being in captivity for weeks, his body has shut down and restarted so often that he has barely even managed to grow a beard — fills him with a desperate sort of rage he doesn’t believe he’s felt since he cradled Renfri’s dying body, or watched Borch plunge into the mist of the ravine, or heard of Kaer Morhen’s fall well after the fact, when he was too late and too far away to help.

He isn't too far away to help now.

So Geralt funnels all of his fury down into his arms, and when he snaps the belt that holds Jaskier fast with his bare hands, it’s as easy as snapping a twig. Jaskier slumps forward and still doesn’t stir as Geralt catches him. Struck suddenly by inspiration, he holds Jaskier steady with one hand, and with the other dives into the bag at his belt filled with potions he’d brought just in case. His fingers close around a familiar round-bottomed bottle. Swallow.

The toxicity might do more damage than good in the long run, but Geralt doesn’t have to worry about killing him, so it’s a risk he’s willing to take in order to rouse him before Stregobor arrives.

Bright green-yellow eyes snap open the minute Geralt tips his head back and pours the bottle of Swallow down his throat. Jaskier seizes in Geralt’s grip, clutching wildly at Geralt’s shoulders and twitching like a half-wild thing.

Just then, the door slams open. Stregobor is barely-contained rage where he strolls in, flanked by two young apprentices, but Geralt does not wait to hear whatever it is he’s going to say. His hand has found a knife at his belt and has hurled it before he realises what he’s done.

The knife bounces harmlessly off a shield Stregobor has conjured up; Jaskier’s fingers are still twitching against Geralt’s shoulders, his eyes blown wide with shock and fright. 

Several things happen at once.

—Stregobor and his two apprentices raise their hands in preparation for some kind of offensive spell; Geralt can smell the magic gathering in the air like thunder.

—Jaskier wrenches himself out of Geralt’s grip, and throws himself at Stregobor with a hoarse sort of screech, teeth bared like a wildcat.

—Yennefer opens the portal, an open maw of raw energy crackling and hissing in the centre of the room.

—And Ciri begins to scream.

Everything freezes with the sound of it; Stregobor’s magic arrested at the source by the noise or perhaps the shock. Jaskier slumps bonelessly to the ground, hands fisted over his ears. Even Yennefer's portal begins to flicker.

Geralt can hardly think. Half-maddened by the sound, he reaches for Jaskier and pulls him back, hands closing around too-thin arms — Yennefer is yelling something, that she can’t hold it, that they need to _go —_ the ceiling cracks overhead, clouds of dust spilling down as the very tower shakes in its foundations — almost in slow motion, Geralt watches a cracked ceiling-tile fall — falling in the exact direction of where Stregobor is still standing, shocked into stillness by the sheer force of Ciri’s voice and pinned between two crumpling apprentices.

And that’s all it takes, in the end. The sharp end of a falling ceiling-tile. It embeds itself in Stregobor’s skull with a wet sound and a vibrant spray of blood. His knees give out first, before he topples, graceless and old, face-down onto the floor, and lies still.

Breathless with shock and adrenaline Geralt grabs Ciri with his other hand and follows Yennefer through the portal just as the tower begins to collapse around them. There is the familiar zing and zap of it; the heart-stopping sensation of hurtling through vast swathes of space at the speed of light.

And with no more fanfare, all four of them tumble in a crumpled heap out of the portal, landing straight into a freezing cushion of snowdrift. Fortunately for Ciri, she lands on Yennefer. Unfortunately for Jaskier, Geralt lands on him.

The cold is shocking, but Geralt barely notices. He rolls to his feet, his heartbeat not _speeding up,_ necessarily, but certainly thumping harder than usual against his ribcage.

Jaskier is staring at him with naked horror in his eyes. He’s not dressed for the cold, especially not after having lost so much weight, but he seems barely to have noticed the fact he's neck-deep in snow. He’s just — staring.

And for the first time in all the years they've known one another, Geralt realises that Jaskier is afraid of him.

“No,” Jaskier whispers, voice hoarse. “Not again. Please, please — not again.”

“Jaskier?” Geralt gasps. “Jaskier—”

“Please.” Jaskier is shuffling back now, chest heaving. Geralt can see his arms shake, his strength flagging as Swallow’s regenerative effects begin to run out. “Please— I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep doing this.” He rises suddenly to his feet, buried up to his bare ankles in snow, his entire body taut with tension as if he is contemplating making a run for it.

“Jaskier?” Ciri whispers. She and Yennefer are stricken where they still sit frozen with fright in the snowdrift. More snow is falling, thickly — they still have the room in the inn, and they need to get indoors before they all freeze.

But Jaskier is still staring at them as if he hardly recognises them. Jaskier is still staring at _Geralt_ as if he barely recognises him. As if he is afraid of him. As if — as if he expects Geralt to _hurt him._

Then, before anything else can happen, Swallow’s effects finally fade. The days spent starved in captivity, the stress of the sudden escape, and the toxicity of the potion all catch up with him at once, as Jaskier’s eyes roll back in his head and he abruptly slumps to the ground in a dead faint.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is this whole rescue scheme littered with mischaracterisation, hand-wavy magic, and holes in logic? Yes. But am I entirely unwilling to do anything about it? Also yes. :) I hope the fact that this chapter was nearly twice as long as usual makes up for the fact it does not really make sense, there were a lot of very convenient holes in Stregobor’s security system, and also that it took me nearly twice as long as usual to finish it lmao
> 
> As usual, thank you for reading, and stay safe <3


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ((Usual warning for violence applies... sorry in advance...))

Jaskier is limp as a bag of potatoes when Geralt lifts him into his arms and carries him into the inn. He ignores the stares and the hushed conversations, leaving Yennefer to wrangle something to eat from Dawid, the innkeeper; Ciri goes to join her, her big blue eyes often proving a valuable asset in situations such as these.

It occurs to him, belatedly, as he climbs the stairs, that maybe Yen and Ciri might just be attempting to give the two of them some time alone. Jaskier hadn’t been frightened of _them;_ he’d hardly spared a glance their way when he had shuffled back, terror writ large into his every feature, eyes white with it, barely cognisant of his own bare feet in the snow. Every time he blinks, Geralt sees Jaskier’s stricken face, as though it has been seared permanently onto his brain. The acrid smell of fear still haunts his nose. 

When he reaches the room, Geralt lays Jaskier gently down onto the bed. He doesn't even stir, head lolling, limbs floppy. Geralt wants to commit this to his mind instead; wants to convince himself that he’s _safe._ If he could, he would overwrite the images of the steel gurney and the metal chair, and banish them from his mind. Jaskier is here, he’s safe, and Stregobor is dead.

Unbidden, Renfri’s last moments flit across his mind. Sinking gently to the ground, her trembling back against his thigh, as her heart shuddered its way to a stop and her wide brown eyes stared beseechingly into his own—

He couldn't save her. He couldn’t stop it.

But Jaskier — Jaskier is still here.

He empties out a breath into the room, silent but for Jaskier’s slow heartbeat.

Jaskier is different from Renfri. A part of Geralt thinks Renfri had _wanted_ to die, at the end. She knew when she fought him that she wouldn't win, and she had kept going anyway. He thinks, maybe, that she knew what was coming but she couldn’t stop; fuelled by some obsessive, endless compulsion to self-destruct, and setting her sights on him to do it. But Jaskier — Jaskier has never wanted to die. He has never been especially afraid of it, for reasons that are obvious in retrospect, but Geralt has met fewer people in a hundred years with a greater lust for life. He brims with it; weathering both love and heartbreak with a peculiarly equal kind of gusto. He’s always been so… _vivid,_ in every possible way. And despite all of Jaskier’s lies, his effortless deception, his elaborate game of pretend two decades long — Geralt doesn’t think that the open-hearted way he threw himself into living is something somebody can fake. Not entirely. Not even Jaskier.

Another sigh gusts out of him as he drags a seat over to Jaskier’s bedside, pressing the back of his hand against his forehead to check for fever and finding none. There’s no smell of blood, either, and Jaskier’s clothes, while dull and unsuited to the cold, are relatively clean. He isn’t wounded; he's just exhausted. The new scars — and there are many of them, Geralt notes with his best attempt at clinical dispassion — are all the faded white of injuries long-healed; they’re nothing but reminders, now. It doesn’t make Geralt feel much better about it.

Yennefer doesn’t bother knocking, just opens the door and waltzes in, a bowl in either hand. “Watered-down broth for him, stew for you,” she says. “Ciri’s exhausted; she’s gone to bed. We’ll need to talk about that scream tomorrow, but right now I think there are more pressing matters to attend to. Never expect me to bring you your meals again. I’m not a servant, despite all the rescuing I’ve found myself doing of late.”

“Of course not,” Geralt says, accepting the food with the closest thing to a smile he can dredge up.

“G’ralt?” A sliver of yellow iris in a chalk-pale face; Jaskier looks shattered, and about three slow blinks away from slipping back asleep. Geralt doubts he’ll remember even having woken in the morning.

Geralt is on edge immediately — remembering the way Jaskier had shrunk back, the acrid stench of fear — but Jaskier is barely awake. He evidently doesn’t have enough wits about him to know what’s going on, never mind enough to be frightened. “I’m here, Jask.”

“Don’t…” Jaskier mumbles, then trails off, as if he’s slipping under again.

“Make him eat some of that now, while he’s awake,” Yennefer orders, nodding to the broth. She’s got a funny sort of pinched look to her eyebrows, and she drags the other chair over to the other side of the bed with a loud enough scrape that Jaskier jerks half-awake again.

Geralt helps Jaskier into a sitting position, trying not to dwell on the thinness of his shoulders; Jaskier, typically, grumbles something incoherent in response, before blinking blearily between the two of them, his unwashed hair mussed and standing at a ridiculous angle at the back of his head. His gaze lands on the bowl and the spoon that Geralt holds in his hand. “That for me?”

Yennefer’s customary frostiness fades slightly as she looks at him, thawing into something that might even be called _fond._ “Eat your broth, you little fool.”

“I will not be spoon-fed like an invalid,” Jaskier announces to the two of them. The fact that he is slightly cross-eyed and can barely keep his head from flopping down does not lend any credence to the claim. When Geralt gives him the spoon, he drops it.

“Yes, you will,” Geralt decides.

“There had better not be anything in this one,” Jaskier says between mouthfuls, in a tone that is probably attempting to be threatening, but falls drastically short, his words slurred with tiredness and eyes half-lidded.

It’s Geralt’s turn to nearly drop the spoon. _There had better not be anything in this one?_ He swallows a rising wave of nausea, and tightens his grip on the bowl. 

“Did Stregobor drug you, Jaskier?” Yennefer asks, very quietly. She’s peering very intently at him, with that searching look she gets whenever she’s trying to decode something.

“Mmm,” Jaskier says, non-committal, chin jutted out stubbornly, as if he’s refusing to answer out of principle. “The real Yennefer is scarier.”

He bats away the spoon, then, refusing to eat any more; the broth is just over half-finished, so Geralt allows it. When he sinks back down onto the pillows, he’s out almost instantly. The two of them just watch him, struck dumb by the implications of everything he’d said.

Geralt rises to his feet, and stares out the window. The snow has stopped. A veil of silence has fallen over the winter landscape outside; everything is muffled and still. The white coin of the near-full moon casts strange shadows on the jagged black mountains that hem the village in, and spins the winding waters of the Gwenllech to silver.

He thinks he would like to resurrect Stregobor just to kill him again; slower, this time.

“Geralt,” Yennefer says, softly, so as not to wake Jaskier. “Stregobor is dead — but whatever magic he used on Jaskier isn’t.”

“He was terrified of me,” Geralt tells her. His voice, he finds, is strangely calm. “You saw how frightened he was.”

“Be careful,” she says, and he turns around to see that pinched look between her brows again. “There’s _something_ … I can’t see it, yet, but there’s something still at work here. I don’t know what — but be careful with him.”

Geralt’s throat has closed up. He nods.

Abruptly, the quiet moment shatters. Her face settles back into its familiar haughty mask as she rises to leave. “And eat your bloody stew. Wrangling one starved witcher up a mountain in the dead of winter will be bad enough, thank you very much, so I don't fancy adding a second to the list.”

“Thank you, Yennefer,” he says.

She pauses by the door, violet eyes strangely soft. “Get some rest, Geralt. Ciri and I are just in the next room.”

Geralt stays by the window for several long minutes more, watching the moon track its path across the heavens, listening to Jaskier’s slow heartbeat, rhythmic and even and sure.

* * *

Julian is lying in a bed. This is not unusual. This is often how it starts.

He stiffens immediately, trying in vain to claw his way back up to consciousness — because it never lasts long — it always feels pleasant enough that he longs to believe in it — but it never lasts and he doesn’t want to be caught unawares. It’s difficult to wake; he’s so _tired._ His eyes feel glued shut, his limbs are made of lead, and his thoughts come in honey-slow dribbles. The safe oblivion of sleep still laps at the edges of his consciousness, beckoning him back down into the softness and the dark.

And why not? He’s tired. He’ll be plunged back into the lake soon, he’s sure, but for now he’s dry, and safe, and in a bed. Why wouldn’t he relish it? Why doesn't he try to sleep for as long as he can?

It’s a reprieve. He’ll take it.

So, with what feels like a tremendous amount of effort, Julian draws his knees up close to his chest and tries to burrow himself deeper into the itchy blankets. His head is aching and he’s very cold, which both strike him as unusual, and the lumpy mattress digs into his ribs, which is even more so. Maybe he _isn’t_ in Oxenfurt; he often wakes in Oxenfurt, but not always. This— this feels more like one of the cheap inns that he and— he had stayed in over the years than the lush comfort he’s used to. He shivers a bit, cradling his chest with his arms and pressing his face into a threadbare pillow, searching for warmth.

Someone hushes him, and tugs a blanket up over his shoulders.

He’s out of bed and pressed with his back against the far wall of the room in an instant. He’s unarmed — but he has his mutant strength, however depleted, and he has his teeth, and he can always make a break for it — he’s always been very hard to catch — there is one door, closed — one window, glass — huh, expensive — grey daylight visible, snowy mountains, must be in the north somewhere — he’ll need to locate warm clothes — but that's a problem for later — fight or flight first — glass can be smashed — a large enough shard will make for a solid knife in a pinch — small candle-holder on the table next to him, smells like iron, that he can use as a projectile if it comes down to it — or break the leg off the chair — but who is he up against? Who—

“Jaskier!”

It’s—

The barrelling train of his thoughts suddenly crashes, careening wildly into flashing images and half-forgotten sensations — lake water, lute strings, bath steam, silk doublets, cheap ale, can’t breathe. He suddenly finds himself utterly incapable of _thinking —_ can’t map out an escape, can’t ready himself for a fight. His head reels, feeling glitchy, achy and top-heavy. When he blinks, hard, the image still doesn't fade. No plunge into the black; the rough-hewn wooden floor stays solid beneath his bare feet.

He opens his mouth, speaking before thinking. “...Geralt?”

“Jaskier,” Geralt breathes. He’s holding up his big hands, palms wide, unarmed. “Jaskier, it’s me. Stregobor is dead. You’re safe.”

Julian hears the words, and understands them only in a very abstract and detached sense. He might even remember hearing a scream that felt hot enough to boil his brain through his ears, and seeing a cracked ceiling-tile fall in the laboratory.

But he’s been fooled before.

Geralt’s jaw is stiff. “I won’t— I won't hurt you,” he says, through his teeth, as if speaking the words pain him. “No one is going to hurt you. I promise.”

Julian stays where he is, with back pressed stiff to the inn wall, counting the steps it’ll take him to reach the doorway. He has been fooled before. He won't let the tricks get the better of him again.

But Geralt — or perhaps not-Geralt — is quite a bit bigger than him, and though his hands are empty, Julian knows there are weapons stowed in every nook and cranny and chink of his armour. What’s more, Not-Geralt hasn’t spent the past few weeks starving. Not-Geralt probably doesn't have a pounding migraine that feels like his very skull has been heated red-hot and pinned between a hammer and an anvil.

And Julian’s always been weak.

He could have gone back on the Path five, ten years after the sacking of the caravan. Realistically, that was enough time to let the dust settle. He could have abandoned his music and his poetry and his fine clothes and his harmless wandering. He should have. A temporary disguise was one thing — but twenty two whole years? Falling in and out of love, going wherever the wind went, or following around a _fellow witcher?_ It was more than an indulgent extension of what was meant to be a brief break for purely practical reasons. It was ridiculous, plain and simple.

But he liked being Jaskier so much more than he liked being Julian. So he stayed. Because he was weak, and he was wanting, and he was not very good at denying himself.

He wants to believe this. He wants to believe Geralt when he says Stregobor is dead. He wants to believe that Geralt means what he says, that he won't hurt him. That he won’t blink and be back in that ghastly place, strapped to the metal gurney, soaked to the bone.

“Jaskier?” Geralt says, as if he can tell that Julian’s resolve is caving. Perhaps he can. Julian’s got very little to hide from Geralt, now.

“Where are we?” Julian asks. He stands up straight, pushing off from the wall. His head still throbs, demanding his attention, and he has to stop himself from staggering. When he runs a mental checklist of his body, he finds nothing that good food and rest won’t fix, which is cold comfort when he still isn’t certain any of this is real. Figuring Geralt is probably unlikely to attack him outright, he tucks his cold hands under his armpits and continues to watch him warily, no longer determined to flee, but still not daring to venture any closer.

“North-west Kaedwen. Village at the base of the mountains. Last stop before Kaer Morhen,” Geralt says, slow and careful. He makes as if to move towards Julian, but seems to decide against it at the last moment, the floor beneath him creaking as his weight shifts. The stifled, aborted movement leaves a tense pocket of air between them, a gulf neither is particularly willing to bridge. “I know you didn’t want to come to Kaer Morhen with Ciri and I, but you need somewhere safe to recover.”

Julian takes a moment to digest that. He can think of many places he’d rather go to lick his wounds than a draughty old keep full of Wolves, not to mention all of his previous and highly compelling reasons for not wanting to be locked in a castle with Geralt for three solid months — but overriding all of that is the desperate desire not to be alone. 

_And why not go with him? None of this is real,_ a horrible voice that sounds an awful lot like Stregobor whispers at the back of his mind.

Geralt looks so hopeful; wide-eyed, almost young. It’s sick, how well the old mage has managed to replicate that look. A growling and glowering Geralt — that’s easy. But this Geralt, teetering on the threshold of honest-to-gods _nervousness?_ As if he thinks Julian is going to snap at him — and worse, as if he’s willing to take it, like the self-sacrificing, noble fool he is at his core? The version of Geralt that he allows so very few people to know? That’s something Julian had thought inimitable. Loath as he is to give Stregobor any praise, this is an illusion for the ages.

The migraine still gnaws at his temples; he can’t help but wince, pinching the bridge of his nose. He’s weak, and he’s wanting, and he’s so easily convinced.

“Fine, Geralt,” he says, voice still little more than a croak. “I’ll come to your little wolf den. But I’ll need much better clothes than these for a snowy mountain hike. Witcher or not, I have a remarkably delicate constitution, you know. Also, do you have any willow bark? My head is fucking killing me.”

Geralt doesn’t smile, but it’s a very near-thing. “Sit down, Jaskier, I can tell you’re freezing. Yennefer and Ciri have gone out for supplies, including new clothes for you. We need to leave today, we’re already late, and if the snow keeps up the trail will be impassable in a couple days.”

He lets Geralt bustle around him, wrapping a blanket around his shoulders and practically tucking him back into the bed. He draws the line at letting him hand-feed him bits of bread, because that just makes him feel sick to his stomach — and not just because he’s still half-starved. 

(He banishes vague memories of being spoon-fed broth in the middle of the night, dismissing them as some kind of hazy dream, as something his affection-starved brain conjured up in a vain attempt to comfort him.)

It feels too caring, too— too _tender._ Too cruel a trick. It’ll break his heart in two when the illusion finally cracks.

“I did not take you for a mother hen,” Julian teases, because he’ll keep thinking if he doesn’t, and thinking is the last thing he wants to do, “but now that I’ve seen the mother-henning in action, I can’t imagine whyever not. You’re a natural at this. Have you ever considered switching careers? Swap out the silver sword for a nursemaid’s habit?”

“Shut up and eat your bread, Jaskier.”

“I take that back. Your bedside manner needs work.”

Geralt snorts before standing to peer out the window, expression tight. “I hate to make you travel so soon, but we’re cutting it fine as it is. Yennefer can only portal us so far. It’ll be a tough climb past that.”

Julian gasps. “Oh no, Geralt, what if the journey kills me?”

Amber-eyed glare, unamused, but soft enough that Julian knows he doesn’t mean it; another part of Geralt he’d thought impossible to minic. “Shut up and eat your bread, Jaskier.”

The food, bland as it is, is sitting a little queasy in his belly, but he can already feel himself perking up a little, like some of the life is returning to him. Maybe—

No. No, he doesn’t dare. The minute he relaxes, the minute he falls for the trick — that’s when the wool will be pulled out from over his eyes. That's when the ground will cave in beneath him. That’s when a slimy hand will latch onto his ankle and drag him down, down, down.

He finishes his bread in silence. He'll keep an eye on this Geralt; he has to.

He won't be fooled again.

* * *

Geralt does not _hover._ He is not a _mother hen._

All the same, he can’t help but secure the heavy winter cloak Ciri and Yennefer acquired for Jaskier a little tighter around his friend’s shoulders as they step out into the cold, ignoring the way Jaskier stiffens ever-so-slightly at his touch. Jaskier seems relatively well, all things considered, even if he’s still too thin, and deep shadows remain under his eyes. They’ll have to talk about all the new scars, soon. They’ll have to talk about whatever it is Stregobor did to him. But Geralt would much prefer they were all safely contained within Kaer Morhen’s walls when that conversation takes place; Yennefer is vaguely unhappy about it, but she doesn’t object, and Ciri is just delighted to have Jaskier back, having launched herself into his arms the minute she saw him like a firework somebody set off too soon.

Jaskier, for his part, is almost as happy to see Pegasus in the stables as he was to see Ciri. The gelding noses through his freshly-washed hair with affection, as Jaskier feeds him oats with an open palm. The day is clear and fresh with no sign of new snowfall; Geralt knows, however, how treacherous the path to the keep will be irregardless of the weather.

“All my stuff gone?” Jaskier’s tone is deceptively light, but Geralt can see the twist to his mouth, and hear his deliberately even breathing.

“Everything that was on you when you were captured,” Geralt tells him. “There will be plenty of spare gear and weaponry in the keep; you’re welcome to pilfer the armoury when we get there.”

“Oho, not afraid I’ll steal all your secrets?” Jaskier teases. Outwardly, he seems unbothered, but Geralt sees how his hand absently goes to his chest — where a silver cat medallion used to hang. Geralt’s heart sinks; there won’t be any of those in Kaer Morhen. But the medallion is buried somewhere in Stregobor's tower, a place none of them are keen to return to, even if they had the time to. There’s nothing to be done, and Geralt’s never been any good at knowing what ought to be said to soothe these sorts of hurts, so he just leaves it.

Instead, Geralt huffs as he leads Roach out of the stable. “What secrets? Lambert’s bread recipe?”

“You bake bread up there?” Jaskier seems genuinely surprised, flashing Ciri a smile as she and Yennefer emerge, both looking oddly misshapen by how thoroughly well-bundled they are against the cold.

“We have to eat, Jaskier.” Geralt shakes his head. “What did you do in the Cat School? Conjure up your dinners out of thin air every evening?”

“Stole them, actually,” Jaskier tells him, wide-eyed and earnest.

“That so?”

“No, Geralt, we weren't actually a just a merry band of thieves.” Jaskier winks at Ciri, helping her up onto Pegasus, before mounting his gelding himself. “We didn't steal all our food.”

Geralt hums, unconvinced.

“We only stole _most_ of it.”

“Oh, well, that’s practically noble,” Yennefer remarks.

“I _am_ the son of a viscount,” Jaskier agrees. Then: “Cirilla! Do you know how to pick-pocket?”

“Gods, here we go,” Yennefer says, long-suffering, as Geralt boosts her up onto Roach with ease. “He’ll turn your Child Surprise into even more of a menace than she already is.”

“I’ve stolen loads of things before,” Ciri objects, as if the implication she hasn’t has wounded her pride. The four of them trot through the fresh snowfall and out of the village boundary; the cold is biting, but bearable. Geralt tries not to let his mood pick up, but it’s hard when the sun is shining and Jaskier’s bright, lively chatter accompanies them; if he closes his eyes, it’s almost like old times again, when Jaskier was just a bard, and Geralt was just a witcher.

“Mm, but have you ever pick-pocketed Geralt?” Jaskier asks her.

“No,” Ciri admits.

“Jaskier,” Geralt warns.

Jaskier smirks, and lifts one side of his cloak to show the knife — Geralt’s knife, that had, last time he’d checked, been in its sheath at his side — attached to his belt.

Yennefer snorts a laugh. Ciri’s grin is reluctant. Geralt scowls.

* * *

There’s much less appetite for chatter once Yennefer portals them as high up the path as Kaer Morhen’s wards against foreign magic will allow. The path winds alongside the Gwenllech, before bottle-necking between two sheer cliff-faces and hugging the narrow slope of the valley, treacherous even in good conditions. The air is thinner up here, the snow much deeper and the cold so severe that they have to blink ice crystals off their eyelashes. When they stop about midway up to the keep for a quick lunch, Jaskier has faded drastically. His smiles are thin and wan, and his gaze distant. He stiffens every time Geralt speaks, something akin to wariness flickering over his expression, his shoulders hunched and nose bitten pink by the cold.

He has not returned the stolen knife.

Geralt tries not to dwell on it. He can sense something brewing — but what can he do, here and now? Force the issue? Remind Jaskier of his promise not to hurt him, and draw attention to the fact he can sense Jaskier's clear mistrust? He doesn't want to spook him further, not when he's still so weak. No, he decides. Whatever needs to be discussed can be discussed in Kaer Morhen, where it's safe.

They don’t stop for long; the light won’t last, not this late in the year, and it’s another four hours hard ride to the keep. Without being asked, Yennefer demands to swap with Jaskier, ostensibly so that she can help keep Ciri warm with some sort of insulation charm; Geralt is well-aware that it’s more for his and Jaskier’s benefit than it is for Ciri’s or her own. Jaskier is trying to hide his shivering, but he can’t quite conceal it from Geralt, especially not when he’s sat before him on Roach’s increasingly weary back. He doesn’t object when Geralt tucks his own cloak around him, but his body is taut and on-edge in every place that they touch, as if—

As if he still doesn’t trust him.

Geralt still tries not to dwell on it.

Then, as it is wont to this far north, the good weather breaks.

The storm announces itself first in the darkening of the sky, as though a shadow falls over the mountain range. The temperature plummets drastically. What weak, watery sunlight that remained is swallowed abruptly by cloud, berry-dark and furious. Roach nickers, ill-at-ease, and even the notoriously lazy Pegasus picks up the pace, his white ears swivelling nervously. A few odd flakes drift down, a sombre precursor to the blizzard promised by the blackening sky.

“You alright?” Geralt murmurs into Jaskier’s ear.

“Peachy,” Jaskier replies, making no attempt to be jovial. Perhaps he softens a little against Geralt’s chest — or perhaps Geralt only imagines it. 

Then it starts to snow in earnest. A faint whistle in the mountain-peaks as the breeze gathers strength.

Geralt nudges Roach forward, leading the way for Pegasus and the girls. Her brown head is bent low, ears flattened against the bitterly cold wind. It picks just up as the snow does, howling shrilly down the spaces between the mountains, flinging freezing snowflakes into their eyes and biting through their cloaks with ease; even Geralt is feeling the cold, now. He knows now that he certainly had left it too late to make the climb; if he’d had any sense, he’d have found them somewhere else to hole up in for the winter. But it's too late to turn back — onward is the only way they can go. The distant lights of Kaer Morhen glitter faintly in the thickening gloom, barely visible through the heavy snowfall, the sparse shrubbery that survives on such unforgiving terrain shuddering with the force of the gales. It isn’t far, now, a scant mile or so, but it may as well be a hundred for how far it feels.

Then they come to the brook, an errant finger of the Gwenllech that rejoins the main river further down the pass. Geralt’s eyes pick it out with ease, but for the two women, the brook must just be a dark rushing shape in the darkness. Jaskier is a block of ice pressed against Geralt’s belly; his hood is tucked low over his eyes, a scarf over his nose and mouth. The yellow backs of his irises reflect scant light. He hasn’t said a word in an hour. Ciri is also looking worse for wear, huddling miserably in front of a tight-lipped Yennefer, her face chalk-white and lips beginning to turn blue. The storm still rages all around them, stealing their breath before it can puff out before them; the wind and the snow a living, snarling thing in the night.

“Yennefer!” Geralt yells back, his voice snatched away by the gales almost as soon as he speaks it. “It’s shallow enough to cross; you and Ciri go first, and we’ll follow. Then it’s a straight line into the keep!”

Yennefer doesn't bother arguing; clearly eager to reach the keep as soon as possible, she nudges a reluctant Pegasus into the shallow waters. The brook barely reaches the horse’s knees; a man could wade it with ease. Geralt waits until the two girls have crossed to the far bank before squeezing Roach’s belly with his heels and directing her into the water.

He doesn’t know what happens. Perhaps Roach’s sure-footed gait fails her, or perhaps a rock comes dislodged from the riverbank, or perhaps the rush of the water trips her up. Whatever the cause, more than halfway across, one leg slips out from underneath her, sending her lurching forward beneath them, hooves scrabbling wildly for purchase on the slippery pebbles.

Geralt barely keeps his seat; Jaskier, half-frozen, is not so lucky. He catches himself, just barely, before he falls, to land with a splash on his hands and knees in the icy water.

That is when the switch flips.

A yellow flash; cat’s eyes in the dark. 

Roach, sensing the danger, lunges for the far bank, carrying Geralt with her — but Jaskier is faster, a shadow with teeth and claws. He leaps, and collides with Geralt hard enough to knock him flying, his backside slipping from the saddle with the force of the blow, Jaskier roaring in his ears. There is the stomach-dropping feeling of falling; Geralt’s instincts, finely honed, immediately kick into action.

The searing shock of cold water; Geralt’s knee is pressed to Jaskier’s belly, pinning him to the slippery riverbank. He thrashes wildly underneath him, wriggling like a caught fish, the water churning white around his head.

“Go!” Geralt screams at Yennefer and Ciri. “Get help!”

Neither of them need telling twice; they take off into the night, Pegasus and Roach’s galloping hoofbeats soon swallowed by the wailing of the storm.

Even submerged, Jaskier caught onto Geralt’s moment of distraction; he jerks himself free, surging up with a show of strength that Geralt had never known him capable of, hair plastered to his head with water, teeth bared and flashing—

“—Jaskier, it’s _me—”_

— And then there is a sharp pain in shoulder, almost easy to disregard, numbed as he is by the cold.

Jaskier has stabbed him with the knife he stole from him that morning.

“No,” Jaskier grits out, eyes livid and charged with fury, his hands fisted at the neck of Geralt’s cloak, all the while both of them are still crouching chest-deep in the freezing shallows of the brook, the wind and the snow and the water still whipping wildly around them, “it’s _not!”_

Geralt barely dodges the punch that’s coming; the force of it unbalances Jaskier, who loses his footing and slips back under the water with a writhing splash. Geralt grabs him by the shoulders — ignoring the twinge of pain in his own — and all but throws the two of them to the right, towards the bank, his limbs stiff with cold and his nerves all lit up with desperate adrenaline. 

His mind races. He has no idea what sparked it; he doesn't know what turned Jaskier — his friend, his friend of more than twenty years — into _this,_ this murderous half-crazed thing, barely even recognisable as the bright-eyed bard who'd strutted up to him with bread in his pants in some shitty tavern in Posada.

Objectively, Geralt had known that Jaskier was a witcher. He’d known that he was a Cat. He'd seen it firsthand; seen it when Jaskier had climbed a hundred-foot tower, and when he had cut down half a battalion of Nilfgaard's soldiers with ease. He'd even heard the rumours about him — the eerie stories that followed Julian of Kerack, the Cat with nine lives.

But this — the madness staring him in the face, spitting and snapping — curdles his stomach. And he doesn't know if this is Stregobor’s doing, or if this is just Jaskier. He cannot tell if the fit of madness was somehow brought upon him — sparked by some unknown trigger — or if this violence, this bloodthirst, this wild, frantic, unhinged _rage_ _,_ has been a part of Jaskier all along, and Geralt had turned a blind eye to it. Maybe this is nothing new; maybe Jaskier's always had this jagged edge, but Geralt has simply never _seen_ it.

They do call him the Mad Cat, after all.

Jaskier scrabbles and twists in Geralt’s grip, shivering as hard as he is fighting. He has the advantage of not caring whether he hurts Geralt or not where Geralt has to pull his punches — but Geralt, unlike Jaskier, hasn’t spent the past month locked in a dungeon; Jaskier's hits are relatively easy to brush off. 

“Jaskier,” he growls, rolling so that his friend is pinned to the bank, the snow crunching beneath them as the sky cracks open overhead. He knows that it's in vain. He knows Jaskier isn’t listening; cannot listen, possessed as he is with his sudden and savage fury. “It’s me—it’s _Geralt—”_

Jaskier just screams through his teeth, his neck corded with tension, his face twisted into something animalistic, his back arching up and legs seizing underneath Geralt’s restraining weight. He wrenches his wrist from Geralt’s grip and yanks the knife free from his shoulder; it glints in the faint light, a barely-there whoosh of movement by his ear. Geralt ducks — only just in time to avoid what would have surely been a deadly hit — the knife slipping from Jaskier’s hand — the splash as it is lost to the water —

The movement dislodges Geralt’s weight, sending him off-balance. Jaskier seizes his chance, and _kicks—_ a blur of dark and cold, hands rough and forceful at his neck— _squeezing_ — the world tilting up and around — before the cold water swallows him, and the back of his head slams _hard_ against a rock, shattering stars in the suffocating black.

Geralt barely stops himself from gasping in a breath of river-water. Dizzy confusion sends the entire planet spinning; he is pinned flat underwater, held fast by Jaskier’s immovable hands at his throat. The world retreats under the freezing black rush, becomes muffled, cold, distant. He can’t breathe.

It occurs to him, slow and strange and out-of-key, that Jaskier might kill him. Darkness presses in on him from every corner. He can’t hold his breath forever; panicked, his strength failing, his head aching, he tries to bat Jaskier’s hands away but Jaskier is an unshakable weight above him, steadfast where he is pinning him down—

—Steadfast, but _shaking—_

“I won't do it, I won’t do it again,” Jaskier is gasping, through sobs — Geralt can hear his hitching voice, can feel the weight of him shuddering on top of him — the very earth seems to quake with it — like the world has shrunk to here and now, under the shallow water, Jaskier’s hands pressed solid to his chest.

He has to get up. He has to push Jaskier off. He has to _breathe—_

“JULEK!”

A dark blur collides with Jaskier and knocks him aside, the world-shattering crash of two bodies into the water next to him barely registering as Geralt surges for the surface, gasping, coughing, spluttering. 

Strong familiar hands — _Eskel,_ he thinks — it smells like Eskel — and a primal sort of relief — because Eskel is here — Eskel will help — Eskel is dragging him to the safety of the bank, the storm still howling all around them, snow whipping into his eyes — “You’re alright Geralt, I’ve got ya—”

“Jaskier,” he grunts out. He needs to find Jaskier. He needs to stop him; he needs to **_save him —_**

“Aiden and Lambert have him—”

Geralt wrenches out of Eskel’s grip, whirling to where he hears the sounds of splashing and scuffling. Lambert and an unfamiliar witcher are wrestling a thrashing Jaskier out of the water, both heaving with the effort of it.

“Julek — _Julian —”_ The unknown witcher, who must be Aiden, is hissing as the two of them struggle to hold him down. “Oh, for fuck’s sake — why don't we just _kill_ him—”

Geralt sees red. He _lunges—_

Only for Eskel to close his arms around his ribs and like a vice hold him fast, as Aiden’s blade flashes silver in the midst of all the chaos, the screaming storm, the terrible wailing wind. The wet thud of the knife hitting its mark cuts through it all, clear as a bell, sharp and distinct and heart-rending. Geralt huffs out a moan.

Jaskier is still for a moment, though his torso heaves. Then he falls slack in Lambert’s grip with a whimper, all the fight abandoning him at once. The handle of the dagger juts from his chest, the sharp iron bite of blood blending with the fresh tang of river-water.

Unperturbed, Aiden yanks the knife back out, and lets Jaskier fall to his knees. Red darkens the snow around him in a violent smear, a vibrant splatter, drawing Geralt's eye like a macabre beacon. He can't look away. His hearing is fine-tuned to the sound of Jaskier’s heart; even through the noise and fury of the storm, he hears it stutter and then come to a stop. Jaskier slumps, falling limp, and then lays still. He looks small and thin where he lies in the snow, the river-water already freezing to crystals on his bone-white face, his mouth parted and eyes half-lidded.

The wind seems to cease for just one awful moment, a moment that stretches out endlessly on the blizzard-torn path to Kaer Morhen. Lambert and Eskel are both breathless with shock, stinking of naked horror. Eskel’s grip on Geralt’s chest remains solid, but Geralt thinks that it’s for Eskel’s benefit more so than his own. And Geralt knows — he knows it isn’t for good — he knows it isn’t forever —

But he’d promised Jaskier. He’d promised him that he wouldn’t hurt him. He'd promised him that this wouldn't happen again. And now, Jaskier lies limp and lifeless in the snow, hardly much better off with Geralt than he'd been in Stregobor's laboratory.

“Oh, don’t look so glum,” Aiden says, voice light and joking even when he is audibly out of breath, a smear of Jaskier’s blood colouring one cheek. “It’s _Julian._ Haven't you heard? He’ll be up and about again in a jiffy, just you bloody wait.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaaand with this chapter we've hit 50k on this series (terrifying) and we are past the midway-point on this fic! Thank you especially to everyone who has commented so far — it really does keep me going!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, nothing major or in-depth, but there is some reference to suicidal thoughts and suicidal ideation in this chapter. If that's something that affects you, please proceed with caution and stay safe.

You wouldn't know now, not by looking at all six and a quarter feet of him, but Aiden was once the runt of the litter. 

For all their supposed differences in mutagens and in method, in honour and glory and sundry — for all the bitter schisms that divide them — it’s the same old story in every Witcher School: nobody makes a witcher out of a wanted child. If Guxart hadn’t picked up the little rat of an orphan hiding behind crates on the harbour in Skellige, skin and bones and brine, Aiden certainly would’ve starved to death — or worse — before his eighth year was through.

He was as small as a boy half his age. Vicious, of course, like all survivors, but a ragged, measly little thing. The other children mocked his Skelligan accent and his curly hair, put dead mice in his bed, and made him run after the wagons when the Caravan took to the road, pushing him down every time he tried to join them where they perched on the overhanging lip. In training, Aiden didn’t win a single fight; mixed up his poisons and antidotes; came last in every race. Guxart would tell him, later, that he hadn’t expected Aiden to last long enough to take the Trials, never mind survive them.

He did survive them, of course, because Aiden is full of spite, and lives to surprise.

He first meets Julian of Kerack when he is ten, not very long after Guxart returns to the Caravan with the news that Treyse and half the grown cats had been killed in some battle with the king in Kaedwen. The adults don’t want the children to know about it, but they’re raising a band of thieves and assassins: of course the children know. Things have been strange and quiet around the Caravan for days; there is some talk of vengeful Wolves, talk of moving again, and soon, half-formed plans brewing for staying on the road the whole summer long.

Under Guxart’s watchful eye, Aiden and his cohort are sparring in the fields, beneath the shadow of the city’s high walls. It is a sunny day in late spring. The knees of all their trousers are covered in grass stains; Myra has a buttercup tucked behind her ear. So far, Aiden has fallen three times, and is nursing a particularly bad bruise on his side after letting his sparring partner, Aron, get the better of him enough to disarm him and whack him with the wooden practice sword. 

Guxart is a stern instructor, though never actively unkind, and instead of admonishing Aiden for faults he knows he will struggle to fix, Guxart instead pays the bulk of his attention to the other, more promising children, leaving Aiden scrambling to catch up.

Aron gets bored of winning with ease, and leaves to join the others. Aiden does _not_ cry. He runs through a couple of the drills solo before he gets frustrated, and stabs his wooden sword into the ground hard enough that it sticks there, jutting out of the grasses like a miserable signpost of his failure.

He’s sitting next to his staked sword with his knees pulled up, stewing in his own bloody misery in the sunshine, when an unfamiliar Cat comes strolling up the hill.

“Now, what’s that sour puss on your face for, kitten?”

Aiden glares at him.

The grown witcher looks weary. There are dried-in bloodstains on his clothes, and shadows ringing his greenish eyes. All the same, he crouches low, smiling, and holds out a hand to help Aiden to his feet. “No sparring partner?”

“I wasn’t good enough, so he left,” he admits, reluctantly, feeling the traitorous tears sting the back of his nose once again.

“Oh, well, that won’t do. You’ll just have to partner up with me, then, huh?” he says, pulling Aiden’s practice sword out of the dirt, and tossing him one of his own knives, retrieved from somewhere unknown on his person. Aiden can’t wait to learn how to do that — to be big, and strong, and able to hide blades up his sleeve and in his boots.

By the time Guxart spots the two of them, the witcher has taught Aiden three new knife tricks, and showed him how to use a bigger opponent’s weight against them to catch them off-balance. Aiden’s tears have dried to salt over the freckles on his cheeks; he feels energised in a way he hasn’t for a long time. Maybe not ever. He can’t _wait_ to show Aron what he can do now.

“You lived?” Guxart says to the stranger. He does not seem very surprised, Aiden thinks.

“When I die,” the witcher replies, his easy smile suddenly turned brittle, “it will not be at a silly little tournament.” He winks at Aiden. “I shall go out in a blaze of glory, or I shall not go out at all.”

Guxart fixes him with a narrow-eyed stare. “Aiden,” he says, “go and run through your drills with the others.”

Aiden tries to hand the witcher back his blade, only for him to shake his head, ruffling Aiden’s curls. “Keep it, kitten, I got plenty more where that came from.”

When Aiden runs back to Aron and the others, they are huddled in a knot by the wall, glancing up at the shadow of Guxart and the other witcher, whispering.

“That’s Julian of Kerack,” Myra says, her eyes bright and voice hushed. “They say he can’t die. They said that Gaetan — you know him, he’s the moody one, his hair is so short that he looks bald — had to put him down after the Trial of the Grasses because the mutagens in him took bad. But he came back, and now nobody can kill him. He won’t die.”

“That’s stupid,” says Aron, jaw jutting out, suddenly furious. “Everybody dies.” He kicks up blades of grass.

None of them question him on his sudden temper. After all, nobody makes a witcher out of a wanted child.

But Aiden keeps a careful eye on Julian of Kerack after that. What Myra says is impossible — only Guxart hadn’t seemed very surprised that Julian alone had survived whatever battle had happened at the tournament in Kaedwen. And there was a lot of blood on his clothes — more blood than even a witcher could survive losing. Aiden looks back to where a stone-faced Guxart speaks very intently to Julian, their voices too far away to carry. Whatever it is he’s saying, Julian does not seem keen on arguing.

Cats have loose loyalties and even looser tongues, and Aiden, despite his other shortcomings, is very good at paying attention. Rumours follow Julian, rumours that no one, not even Guxart, makes much effort to dispel. When the Caravan is attacked by bandits, Julian takes an arrow to the throat, and walks away. An assassination attempt goes awry, and Julian falls out of a castle window and breaks his neck; he’s up and about again the next day. An argument with Joël flares into all-out violence, swords clanging in the courtyard — but Joël doesn’t bother delivering the killing blow because “it won’t do much good when it comes to you, Julek, anyway.”

Aiden pays attention. And Myra, gods rest her soul, wasn’t wrong: Julian of Kerack is impossible to kill.

Now, half an entire bloody century later, standing outside in the middle of a fucking _snowstorm_ , he’s staring at three furious wolves, and wondering why they each seem so put-out with him. He’s long since gotten over the various hang-ups instilled in him by spending his early years as the Cat School’s resident runt, but some lessons are hard-learnt, and the fact that even _Lambert_ looks pissed — well, it doesn’t exactly bode well for him. A queasy feeling in his belly, a fear that he might be exiled from the keep, even if Lambert had promised that it’d be fine, even if that crusty old Vesemir hadn’t yet attempted to smother him in his sleep—

“It’s Julian,” he says, again, because surely they _know?_

The white-haired witcher that Julian had been doing his very best to drown — Gerald, or something — growls at him, shrugging off Eskel’s restraining hand and stalking forward. Aiden tenses, certain that he’s about to be struck, but Gerald just crouches low and picks up Julian’s wet corpse, cradling him as tenderly as one would cradle a lover, not a barking-mad witcher one just narrowly avoided being murdered by. 

Aiden watches this with one eyebrow raised. _A_ _nd they say the Cats are the insane ones,_ he thinks, but doesn't dare voice that aloud.

“What the fuck, Aiden?” Lambert says, sounding _wounded._ As if Aiden has gone and betrayed him in some way, instead of being the only one here who has his head even remotely screwed on. Should have known wintering in Kaer Morhen was a terrible idea.

Aiden just scowls, breathing through his teeth, ignoring the wind that still wails mournfully all around them, the chill that bites through his armour with ease. “He was spitting mad, Lamb, you saw it yourself. Sometimes the best thing you can do for a fella when he gets like that is give him a good hard knock to the head. Reset him.”

“A knock to the _head_ , Aiden, not a knife to the fucking heart—”

“He’s right. Jaskier can’t die,” Gerald interrupts, curtly. He’s already trudging his way up to the keep, holding Julian’s corpse close, knuckles clenched and face ghostly-pale.

Aiden extends both bloodstained hands in a gesture that clearly says, _I told you so!_ It’s not an easy movement, considering the river water he was doused in has frozen and he’s lost all feeling in his arms from the elbow down.

“What the fuck is going on?” Eskel pipes up, voice mild. Bless him, he’s clearly been knocked for six. _Leave it to Julek,_ Aiden thinks.

“Our dear Julian is like a weed,” Aiden tells him, taking pity. “You cut him down only for him to pop straight back up again. Now, can we _please_ go back inside? I'm so fucking cold, I swear my balls have retreated so far up my body I can feel ‘em in my throat.”

Lambert cuffs Aiden on the back of the head for that, but in an affectionate way. Without another word, Aiden turns and follows Gerald’s footprints in the snow, ignoring the way Eskel claps a hand on Lambert’s shoulder, announcing that he’s worried about the sort of people the younger witcher calls his friends.

Whatever. Aiden is a pragmatist, plain and simple. Julek will rouse right as rain in the morning, with none of them any worse for wear, they’ll see.

* * *

Cold water. Lake? No— _river,_ you idiot, you idiot— you’re gonna kill him— you have to stop— you’re going to kill him!

River water and lake water don't taste all that different, not when they're both cold enough to hurt his teeth, to chill his bones, to burn his lungs when he finally caves in and takes a breath.

_You’re alright, kitten—_

Heavy limbs, spreading numb, the world darkening like somebody's drawn a curtain over the sun, the moon, the stars. Good-night, good-night, good—

Geralt?

_Damn it, Jaskier! Why is it that whenever I find myself in a pile of shit these days, it’s you shovelling it?_

Not fair. His mother could freeze him with a look. Leave him out in the cold. The son she never wanted, the son she can’t be rid of.

_You’re alright, kitten, hush—_

Head aches something horrible. Stars blurry overhead. In the wagon? Rocking floor, piled high with blankets. Gezras, ancient as he is, whispers something to him in Elder, and presses a weathered palm to his too-hot cheek. He was not often sick, and this was only a mild fever. He would live.

The stars turn to ceiling tiles. He knows that pattern intimately. He can count them; he knows every curve of that vaulted dungeon ceiling as well as he knows the shape of his own nose on his face, the scars that curl around his knuckles, the lute-string calluses on his fingertips.

He thinks that was when he was happiest. A wanderer, vagabond, daft little fool, instrument rather than sword in the hand, song rather than scream in the throat. The world was kinder to him, and he was kinder to the world. And Geralt had loved him, at least a little, at least enough to be getting on with.

_If life could give me one blessing, it would be to take you off my hands!_

Sometimes he thinks that if he could, he would. He’d die gladly, and leave it all behind. Gods know his end is long overdue. But he can't leave; he'll just be dragged back. And maybe Geralt will have his blessing, someday, but he asked for it in the wrong place. Life will never let Julian — let _Jaskier —_ go.

_There is a mystery at the heart of you, Julian Alfred Pankratz—_

And always, always, back to the lake. The place where he begins and he ends, a hundred times over. He's determined to reach the surface. The moon is cut though with ripples from underneath, tiger-stripes in the silver coin of it; it’s late in the month. Julian will reach it. He’ll reach the moon and then like a wolf he will _howl;_ howl to prove he's alive. Sing to prove that he's still here and still fighting.

He blinks and he is soaking wet, clothes clinging to him, breath sore in his chest, feet buried in silt on the lake bank. Gaetan is there, shoulders hunched as he gazes back at Julian, more the impression of a person than an honest presence. There is no heartbeat. He looks younger than he had the last time Julian saw him, his face shadowed and rimmed in silver by the mercury light of the moon.

“Are you coming, Julian?” he says.

“Where?” Julian says, hoarse.

“You’ll see,” says the thing that looks like Gaetan, but isn’t Gaetan at all. “I’ve got something to show you.”

* * *

One foot in front of the other, crunch through the snow, until he reaches the gate. Geralt shifts Jaskier’s weight in his arms. He does his best not to think about it, about any of it. The cold has numbed him to the core, has frozen his heart, and he’s glad of it. He doesn't think he could bear it otherwise.

Vesemir and another witcher are waiting at the gate; Geralt recognises him as Coën. They’ve crossed paths only once or twice before, and not since the fall of Kaer Seren; he hadn’t known he would be wintering here, too. With Aiden and Jaskier to join the ranks, they’re practically a crowd. Loneliness has forged odder friendships, Geralt supposes; he’d once let a garrulous and grating bard trail him halfway across the Continent.

He tightens his grip on Jaskier’s cold body, tucking him closer, the line of his throat scarred and pale as his head lolls limp against Geralt’s shoulder.

Coën holds his crossbow ready, clearly having been prepared to defend the keep should Jaskier have escaped from Eskel, Lambert and Aiden. Geralt is too weary to react to it. He brushes off their concerns at the limp form in his arms with a shake of his head. 

“What happened, Geralt?” Vesemir asks, without preamble. He’s got a familiar, tight set to his jaw that spells brewing trouble, but Geralt ignores it.

“He’s dead for now,” he says shortly, pushing past them.

He meets Yennefer at the door, who takes one look at his face, and wisely decides not to comment. “Put him in front of the fire, warm him up,” she orders. “Then I’ll take a look, and see if I can figure out what made him snap.”

The stones underneath his feet welcome him. He knows every groove and dip intimately; the faded pattern of the tapestries on the walls, the precise flicker of the torchlight and the distant whistling of the storm, echoing the hundreds of others that he's taken shelter from in these draughty old rooms. It should bring him relief to be back in Kaer Morhen, to be _home,_ but he just feels oddly hollow, wrung-out and raw. 

Ciri is huddling next to the hearth in the main hall, sniffling, her eyes bloodshot underneath her cap. Her breath hitches when she sees Geralt and Jaskier, but she doesn’t say anything — just shuffles back to make room.

A pang of guilt strikes deep in Geralt’s belly. He’s meant to be _protecting_ her — he’s meant to be keeping her safe, meant to shield her from the horrors of the world as much as he can, not exposing her to more of them. She’s seen so much death in so short a time; she’s haunted by it. How many of Jaskier’s deaths have to be added to the pile? Jaskier dotes on her, and she on him. He should be teaching her how to play the fucking lute — or how to throw knives, Geralt amends darkly — not have his cold corpse laid out in front of her to thaw. He supposes he ought to be glad that he got her to Kaer Morhen, that she’s safe, for now, at least — but relief feels very far away from him now.

Yennefer crouches next to Jaskier, and almost tenderly brushes his ice-covered fringe back from his eyes. It’s odd, Geralt thinks, how quickly their mutual antagonism faded, but he supposes Jaskier just has that effect on people. She hums, thoughtfully.

“What?” he says.

“The spell is still working on him,” Yennefer says. Violet eyes peer up at him from under dark eyebrows. “Whatever Stregobor did has taken hold, enough to function independent of the source. I think — I think that’s why Jaskier snapped. Or, at least, part of the reason. With magic like this, cause and effect is never straightforward.”

“Magic like what?” Geralt asks. He feels heavy all over.

Yennefer waves a hand vaguely in the direction of her head. “Probing magic. Rooting out the source of something. Digging up buried or hidden things. Unravelling, un-whelving. I’ll be able to gauge what it is more accurately when he revives.”

“Which he will not be doing in here,” comes the furious growl at the door. Vesemir all but stalks into the hall, angrier than Geralt has ever seen him; almost bashfully, Eskel, Lambert, Coën and Aiden shadow him. Clearly, they’ve filled him in. “Another Mad Cat is bad enough,” Vesemir continues, “but this one just tried to _kill_ you, Geralt. We’ve been bitten by Cats before, or don’t you remember? Either this one proves himself civilised, proves he can control himself, or we throw him from the keep. No arguments.”

Aiden makes no attempt to defend himself or his School; in fact, by the way he’s hovering next to Lambert, and the vaguely anxious glances he keeps sending toward Vesemir’s back, Geralt would wager he’s half-afraid of being expelled from Kaer Morhen himself.

“Jaskier just spent the past month at the mercy of an evil, rotten wizard!” Ciri is suddenly on her feet. “They tortured him — killed him over and over again. He’s not crazy or unstable, he’s just scared! He would _never_ have tried to hurt Geralt if he’d been in his right mind! _You can’t throw him out!”_

The glasses on the table rattle at the touch of hysteria in her voice. She still looks fit to collapse, her hands trembling, as she moves to stand between Jaskier’s corpse and the five witchers, a defiant tilt to her chin.

“Vesemir, Lambert, Eskel,” Geralt says, drily, “meet Cirilla, my Child Surprise.”

Aiden elbows Coën. “Were you guys this dramatic?”

“Not remotely,” Coën replies.

“I hate to interject, but I’m still hung up on the immortality part,” says Eskel, even-tempered as always. “Is nobody else still hung up on the immortality part?”

“It’s not unheard of,” Vesemir says. His anger has faded, but not entirely. Mostly, he just looks old, and tired. “Phoenixes. Certain exceptionally powerful curses. That sort of thing. But it’s rare. So rare that most consider it to be a myth. I take it this wizard is no longer capable of recounting any of his findings?”

“He’s dead,” says Ciri, with a vicious sort of snarl. “I killed him.”

“Good,” Aiden mutters, vehement.

“All the same,” Vesemir says. “Your friend is clearly unstable, and I won’t allow him to revive alone and unguarded.”

“I’ll guard him,” Geralt insists.

“Not alone, you won't,” Vesemir shoots back.

“Yeah no offense, Geralt,” says Lambert, “but that clearly didn’t work out so well the last time. You’d have drowned in the fucking brook if Aiden and I hadn’t tackled your pet pussycat in time, and you know it.”

Geralt closes his eyes, breathing out through his nose. Objectively, he can see where they’re coming from. Subjectively, if any of them lay another finger on Jaskier, he’s liable to cut the offending digit off. “Jaskier isn’t crazy.”

“Coulda fooled me,” Lambert mutters.

“Wait,” says Eskel, a line between his brows, his scarred face twisted in confusion. _“Jaskier?_ Is that not the name of your dead bard, Geralt?”

“Not dead. Not a bard,” Geralt grunts. He doesn't think he has it in him for a more detailed explanation. Not for the first time, he thinks back to this time last year, when his grief over the supposed death of his bard was still fresh. It all feels like another life, now — and Geralt has lived long enough to know what that feels like.

It occurs to him, sudden and sharp as a gong going off, that Jaskier’s old broken lute is still here, gathering dust underneath his bed.

Geralt can feel himself sagging where he leans against one of the tables, the blow to the back of his head still aching a little, his cold and wet clothes clinging to his frigid skin, chilling him to the core. If Jaskier wasn't still in such a sorry state, and worry wasn't gnawing incessantly at his heels, Geralt’s sure he’d be fit only to sleep for a week. 

But Geralt needs to get them all settled in — needs to find Yennefer and Ciri each a proper bedroom, needs to unpack the horses, needs to strip Jaskier's soaking-wet clothes from his corpse and warm him up properly before he stirs —

“Lambert,” Eskel says, suddenly, “why don't you make yourself useful and make sure the horses are stabled properly? Or set up rooms for the sorceress and Cirlla?”

Geralt glances over; Eskel flashes him a gentle sort of smile. Eskel shrugs, and gives Lambert a good-natured shove out the door. 

“I’ll help,” Coën says immediately, almost comically eager to escape the tense atmosphere of the hall. Aiden, too, is quick to follow, wordlessly slinking out of the room after Lambert as if he can’t function independently outside of Lambert’s shadow. Geralt would feel bad for him, and for how evident it is that he is still uncertain of his footing here in Kaer Morhen, amongst all these Wolves — but the fact remains that he killed Jaskier, no matter how benign his reasons, and so Geralt is finding it a little hard to dredge up any pity for him at the moment. Once they go, it’s just Vesemir and Eskel left, Vesemir’s arms folded and expression thunderous, and Eskel looking rather like he can think of a hundred places he would rather be, but is sticking it out sheerly to provide moral support.

Geralt turns back to Jaskier’s still form where he lies on the hearth. Yennefer has Jaskier’s head pillowed on her knees; the ice and snow have melted into a puddle underneath his body, but it doesn’t appear to bother her. She’s frowning, still, ignoring all of them as she presses her fingertips to either one of Jaskier’s blue-tinged temples. His head is tilted a little to the side, so that all Geralt can see from where he leans against the table is a white expanse of cold cheek, pallid and bloodless, and a fan of dark lashes. 

Ciri sinks down to her knees, and takes Jaskier’s hand in her own, lower lip jutting out stubbornly, as if she dares any one of them to order her to leave him. “We should get him dry,” she says. “He’s still freezing.”

“We can take him to my room,” Geralt decides. “Wait for him to wake.”

“Eskel and I will be coming, too, if you don’t mind,” Vesemir says, in a tone of voice that brokers no argument even if Geralt decides he does, in fact, mind. “Whatever he is, I don’t want him in the keep unsupervised.”

“Fine,” Geralt sighs, moving to pick Jaskier up again.

“Wait,” says Yennefer, distracted. “I think—”

“You think what?” Geralt asks.

Her face is a little pale, and her full mouth flattened into a thin line. “I don’t think he will be waking. Not this time.”

“What?” Geralt says, faint, the stone-paved floor swaying underneath him, a sensation of crumbling in his chest as his heart caves in. “You mean—”

“He’s not _dead,”_ she says, “not entirely, not for good, not yet, but— but there’s something wrong. He’s not coming back. The magic is leaving him — the _life,_ it’s leaving him. Draining away. He’s fading, Geralt. And I don’t know how to stop it. He’s fading, and I don’t know how to bring him back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's okay. you have full permission to throw rotting fruit at me.
> 
> (This Story Will Have A Happy Ending)


End file.
